A thermometer displays 42 degrees Celsius in the city of Isesaki, Gunma Prefecture, on Aug. 5. | JIJI The Environment Ministry plans to step up efforts to prevent elderly people from suffering heatstroke indoors, including at home. It has requested ¥1 billion for related measures under the government's fiscal 2026 budget. The government has set a target of halving the average annual number of heatstroke deaths by 2030 from some 1,300 marked during the five years through 2022, but fatalities hit a record high above 2,000 in 2024. According to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency, 57.4% of people taken to hospital by ambulance due to heatstroke in May-September 2024 were aged 65 or older. Of the total cases, 38.0% occurred at houses, making up the largest share. While elderly people are at higher risk of heatstroke due to their declining thermoregulation and ability to sweat, some refrain from using air conditioners even on very hot days.

We are now living longer, and the number of people worldwide aged 65 and over is expected to grow from 703 million in 2019 to 2.2 billion in 2080, according to the World Population Prospects Report published by the United Nations last year. The proportion of the global population that is elderly is also on the rise, almost doubling from 5.5% in 1974 to 10.3% last year, and it is projected to grow to 20.7% by 2074. A consequence of aging is that we are more likely to have medical problems. At the same time, the healthcare system in many countries is already stretched due to a lack of workers. "There are just not enough doctors and nurses to deal with a growing elderly population," said Massimiliano Zecca, a professor of healthcare technology at Loughborough University in the U.K. In the U.S, for example, a severe shortage of doctors is expected by 2034, with between 37,800 and 124,000 physicians lacking, partly fueled by the growing number of seniors, according to a recent report by the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).

This article presents a case study demonstrating a non-intrusive method for the well-being monitoring of elderly people. It is based on our real-time energy measurement system, which uses tiny beacons attached to electricity meters. Four participants aged 67-82 years took part in our study. We observed their electric power consumption for approx. a month, and then we analyzed them, taking into account the participants' notes on their activities. We created typical daily usage profiles for each participant and used anomaly detection to find unusual energy consumption. We found out that real-time energy measurement can give significant insight into someone's daily activities and, consequently, bring invaluable information to caregivers about the well-being of an elderly person, while being discreet and entirely non-intrusive.

Previous researchers have proposed intelligent systems for therapeutic monitoring of cognitive impairments. However, most existing practical approaches for this purpose are based on manual tests. This raises issues such as excessive caretaking effort and the white-coat effect. To avoid these issues, we present an intelligent conversational system for entertaining elderly people with news of their interest that monitors cognitive impairment transparently. Automatic chatbot dialogue stages allow assessing content description skills and detecting cognitive impairment with Machine Learning algorithms. We create these dialogue flows automatically from updated news items using Natural Language Generation techniques. The system also infers the gold standard of the answers to the questions, so it can assess cognitive capabilities automatically by comparing these answers with the user responses. It employs a similarity metric with values in [0, 1], in increasing level of similarity. To evaluate the performance and usability of our approach, we have conducted field tests with a test group of 30 elderly people in the earliest stages of dementia, under the supervision of gerontologists. In the experiments, we have analysed the effect of stress and concentration in these users. Those without cognitive impairment performed up to five times better. In particular, the similarity metric varied between 0.03, for stressed and unfocused participants, and 0.36, for relaxed and focused users. Finally, we developed a Machine Learning algorithm based on textual analysis features for automatic cognitive impairment detection, which attained accuracy, F-measure and recall levels above 80%. We have thus validated the automatic approach to detect cognitive impairment in elderly people based on entertainment content.

Current language processing technologies allow the creation of conversational chatbot platforms. Even though artificial intelligence is still too immature to support satisfactory user experience in many mass market domains, conversational interfaces have found their way into ad hoc applications such as call centres and online shopping assistants. However, they have not been applied so far to social inclusion of elderly people, who are particularly vulnerable to the digital divide. Many of them relieve their loneliness with traditional media such as TV and radio, which are known to create a feeling of companionship. In this paper we present the EBER chatbot, designed to reduce the digital gap for the elderly. EBER reads news in the background and adapts its responses to the user's mood. Its novelty lies in the concept of "intelligent radio", according to which, instead of simplifying a digital information system to make it accessible to the elderly, a traditional channel they find familiar -- background news -- is augmented with interactions via voice dialogues. We make it possible by combining Artificial Intelligence Modelling Language, automatic Natural Language Generation and Sentiment Analysis. The system allows accessing digital content of interest by combining words extracted from user answers to chatbot questions with keywords extracted from the news items. This approach permits defining metrics of the abstraction capabilities of the users depending on a spatial representation of the word space. To prove the suitability of the proposed solution we present results of real experiments conducted with elderly people that provided valuable insights. Our approach was considered satisfactory during the tests and improved the information search capabilities of the participants.

The town of Ono, Fukushima Prefecture, and Fukushima Medical University have set on promoting elderly people's health using esports, a competition using computer games. They have been holding trial sessions since September by inviting people who are interested and analyzing the effects of gaming experience on cognitive functions. Based on the results of the assessments, they plan to set up gaming machines in meeting places and other locations so that elderly people can feel free to use them.

Humanity is at a crossroads that might be summed up as AI for good v AI gone bad, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert. "I see two futures here," the author Prof Gary Marcus told the UN's AI for Good global summit on Friday. In the rosier version, AI revolutionises medicine, helps tackle the climate emergency and delivers compassionate care to elderly people. But we could be on the precipice of a bleaker alternative, with out-of-control cybercrime, devastating conflict and a descent into anarchy. "I'm not saying what's coming; I'm saying we need to figure out what we're doing," Marcus told the summit.

Grace is a nursing assistant, Ai-da a contemporary artist, Desdemona a purple-haired rock singer and Nadine is on hand for companionship and conversation. They are all at the world's largest gathering of humanoid robots, which is under way at the United Nations AI for Good global summit in Geneva. Rapid advances in AI have in recent years fuelled increasing unease that the technology could become more powerful than humans, with dire consequences. But the summit – with its extensive cast of robotic delegates – is focused on more favourable scenarios in which AI could be harnessed for positive causes. Among the most enthusiastically optimistic are the creators of the various humanoid robots in attendance, which they suggest could enrich our lives in ways that sometimes seem bewildering to the uninitiated.

A robot which could work as a nurse or barman, and which can pick up objects with its human-like arms is already at work in the U.S., the CEO of a company funded by OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT has revealed. Bernt Bornich, CEO and founder of 1X, says that his company's humanoid EVE robot has been working since April this year - and that it is going'better than we thought.' It's the first truly humanoid android to find a place in the workplace in human history - outpacing Elon Musk's hyped Tesla robot. At present, the robot is working as a security guard at two industrial sites: unlike other security robots, it has a head, a face, two arms, and can navigate autonomously. Security guards control a fleet of patrolling EVE androids, which are made at two sites in Norway and Dallas, and if anything happens to one of the units, they can'step into' the android's body through virtual reality. 'You're there in a second as if you were there,' Bornich says.

Loneliness and social isolation are serious and widespread problems among older people, affecting their physical and mental health, quality of life, and longevity. In this paper, we propose a ChatGPT-based conversational companion system for elderly people. The system is designed to provide companionship and help reduce feelings of loneliness and social isolation. The system was evaluated with a preliminary study. The results showed that the system was able to generate responses that were relevant to the created elderly personas. However, it is essential to acknowledge the limitations of ChatGPT, such as potential biases and misinformation, and to consider the ethical implications of using AI-based companionship for the elderly, including privacy concerns.