{"doi":"10.1111/jgs.17100","title":"Smart moves for an aging population","abstract":"How can doctors holistically support the rapidly growing aging population and meet the needs of individual older adults where they are? This critical national dilemma, brewing within the U.S. healthcare system for decades, partially due to advances in medicine, urgently needs attention. The U.S. population aged 65 and older will comprise 20% of the total population by 2030.1, 2 Given that this population represents the majority of healthcare spending,3 profound implications exist for the future of healthcare,4 especially when residential care is needed.5 To optimize care while mitigating risk for older adults, we need a healthcare system that takes bold action to find smart and creative solutions to meet growing care demands. The progression of COVID-19 has only trumpeted this imperative further, with critical levels of healthcare workers reporting burnout and healthcare facilities reaching staffing and capacity shortages.5 The pandemic accentuates care access concerns for older adults, increasingly isolating them and enlarging barriers to safe and timely care.6-9 However, the pandemic affords an opportunity to reconsider solutions for reducing skilled and long-term care staff workload while also addressing older adults' growing desire, and need, for in-home care. Smart home health monitoring technologies could help with transitioning care from healthcare centers to the home. Conceptualized in various ways, unobtrusive smart home technology takes on many forms in the minds of its developers with almost every aspect of life becoming a measurable observation datapoint.10, 11 With an integrated smart home health monitoring care model, access to healthcare becomes easier than ever, pandemic exposure risks can be reduced, and care plans can become even more targeted to older adults' individual needs. But how close to home is too close? Privacy and comfort levels are important variables in the delivery of smart home medicine.12 Older adults indicate they are overwhelmingly ready to accept smart homes that include health monitoring for the opportunity to stay at home longer.13, 14 They recognize that moving to the next level of care results in loss of privacy as well. Many wish to partake in the potentially enormous results10, 15, 16 afforded by the unobtrusive health monitoring revolution. Utilizing only five sensor modalities including infrared motion, contact, light, temperature, and humidity, smart home technology has the ability to detect falls, urinary tract infections, and even leg cramps in participants living at home in retrospective analysis.10 With the help of machine learning, one may envision a smart home environment that can detect significant health events in real time and alert providers or emergency services, allowing for earlier intervention and improved health outcomes.17, 18 As technology advances, it is not unreasonable to extrapolate this idea to a future where algorithms may predict impending illness prior to overt symptomatology, allowing healthcare providers the opportunity to redirect the trajectory of illness proactively. Smart home monitoring may also be used to track treatment progress and provide objective documentation of improvement in various health states. Coupling this data with a robust user interface17 may change provider-patient interactions and bring tangible evidence to individualized health conversations allowing for further partnership, targeted goal setting, and a source for personal health motivation. Information from smart homes will help older adults maintain ownership of their health and afford providers health promotion and health coaching opportunities. By monitoring older adults with chronic conditions in this way, smart home technology has the potential to drastically change the delivery of healthcare and provide positive outcomes for those who need it most. Having a virtual healthcare presence nearby may prolong independence by affording the possibility that hospitalizations can be ","journal":"Journal of the American Geriatrics Society","year":2021,"id":204862,"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":3,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9571,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":503025,"name":"Roschelle Fritz","orcid":"0000-0002-0320-6763","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":788264,"name":"Samuel R. Josephsen","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":16,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:51:30.197308Z","pmid":"33713420","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":[]}