{"doi":"10.1093/gerona/glaf240","title":"AI-enabled wearables and virtual humans in aging: from signals to meaningful care","abstract":"Artificial intelligence (AI), wearable sensors, and virtual agent technologies are moving rapidly from research labs into older adults’ daily lives and clinical care. These tools hold great promise to support the independence of older people, but if poorly implemented they can also introduce new burdens. As a geriatrician and an AI scientist collaborating on this editorial, we aim to introduce a special issue of The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences focused on AI-enabled wearables and virtual human agents in aging. Here we briefly summarize each study in the issue and distill practical lessons to help translate raw digital “signals” from devices into care that truly matters for older patients: Continuous, real-world data are feasible if we design for it: Ford and colleagues1 demonstrate that long-term, real-world health monitoring with consumer wearables is achievable even in cognitively impaired older adults. In their study, individuals with mild cognitive impairment wore Apple Watches for 6 months, yielding over 700 000 physiological and behavioral data points with remarkably high adherence. The researchers did encounter practical issues, such as device compatibility and software settings that affected data completeness, but by logging these “friction points” they provide a roadmap to improve future deployments.","journal":"The Journals of Gerontology Series A","year":2025,"id":587663,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9627,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1503720,"name":"Rama Chillapa","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":264351,"name":"Peter Abadir","orcid":"0000-0002-8186-0066","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":8,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:59:39.958043Z","pmid":"41482501","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}