Janice Chia

Founder & Managing Director, Ageing Asia

As Asia Pacific becomes home to the world’s most rapidly ageing populations, technology is playing a critical role in reshaping how societies support longevity. This presentation explores the rise of smart wearables, digital health platforms, and precision medicine as transformative tools in ageing care. Janice Chia, Founder and Managing Director of Ageing Asia, highlights regional innovations, adoption challenges, and future directions for building inclusive, tech-enabled ecosystems that empower older adults to age with dignity, independence, and purpose.

Influenced by the changing needs of her elders, Janice was inspired to start Ageing Asia to drive and nurture opportunities and the development of innovation and solutions that address the evolving needs of the rising ageing population in the region. Having accumulated a vast experience from visiting over 423 residential and aged care homes from over 15 countries since starting her practice in 2009, Janice has been actively involved in consulting organisations seeking global best practices in housing, health and care models that can be translated for the Asian market. She has also been quoted regularly in the media, such as the BBC, on Asia Pacific business trends in ageing. Janice has also launched several industry initiatives, including, ASPIRE55 Singapore – Asia’s first virtual retirement village, a wellbeing community that offers a combination of social, health and care services, but enables members to continue living in their existing homes.

Emil Rosenlund Høeg

Postdoctoral Researcher, Aalborg University

As the ageing population grows, so does the demand for innovative technologies that can sustain health and well-being. For decades Researchers have explored how wearable technologies, such as virtual reality (VR), can increase enjoyment, sustain exercise retention and performance for older adults undergoing tedious (or even painful) rehabilitation programs. However, health outcomes are largely shaped by human behavior, which makes user-centered design approaches crucial to the development and successful implementation of solutions. This keynote draws on interdisciplinary research conducted in collaboration with Danish municipal healthcare facilities, which explored how VR interfaced with exercise bikes may cultivate autonomous motivation for older adults who engage in physical activity during care. The talk will also address empirically grounded designs guidelines, specifically with consideration for the specific needs and limitations common to the elderly population.

Hannah R. Marston

Senior Research Fellow, The Open University

Digital technologies and transformation are pivotal in contemporary society. In this presentation Dr Marston will provide a brief overview of past and current research projects and explore why inter-and-multidisciplinary research is important to levelling up equity for everyone in society. Hannah will draw on the project ‘Adapt Tech, Accessible Technology’ (ATAT) and the importance of digital literacy, language, and participatory activities. She will conclude with a series of recommendations to elicit thought provoking discourse to enhance collaborative research in the future.

Hannah R. Marston is an interdisciplinary researcher interested in the relationships between technologies, young and older users experience (UX), digital inclusion, health, wellbeing, age-friendly cities and communities. She collaborates with colleagues across the UK and internationally, including the Age-friendly Balkans Connected (ABC) Network. Previously, Hannah was a research scientist at the German Sport University Cologne, working on the EU project – iStoppFalls; she led the Technology In Later Life (TILL) project. Currently, she is a Co-I on the NIHR DIALOGUE project and is leading a project regarding dementia-friendly cities. Her research has been cited in policy documents, leading to immediate policy impact and changes to the Disability Facilities Grant, through the inclusion of the assistive technologies section. Hannah publishes widely and has edited, or coauthored special journal issues, books, and is the editor of the recently edited collection ‘Society and Technology: Promoting Well-Being in a Digital Age’ (2025).

Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky

Assistant Professor, Louisiana State University

To create technologies that truly serve older adults, we must begin by listening—understanding their needs, values, and lived experiences. This talk explores how real-world behaviors and privacy concerns among older adults reveal design opportunities that often go unnoticed in traditional engineering workflows. Drawing from studies in Human-Computer Interaction, psychology, and aging, I will share practical strategies for grounding AgeTech in the realities of older adults’ lives and designing technologies that are not only functional but also empowering and meaningful to them.

Reza Ghaiumy Anaraky is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Computer Science and Engineering at Louisiana State University and the director of the ACT Lab (Aging, Cognition, and Technology). He earned his Ph.D. from Clemson University in 2022 and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. His research lies at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, information privacy, and aging. Reza explores how age-related factors shape privacy decision-making and examines the impact of technology use on older adults’ cognitive and psychological well-being. His work has been recognized with several honors, including a Meta Fellowship, a Google Research Award, three best paper awards, and the Innovative Research on Aging Award from the Mather Institute. He has also contributed to grant proposals that secured over $700,000 in research funding.

James Kah

Associate Professor, National University of Singapore (NUS)

There is an urgent need for affordable, locally developed gerontechnology in Singapore, yet no existing university course builds capability in this area. Most engineering courses focus on classroom-based learning with limited community engagement. To address this, I started an undergraduate elective titled “Gerontechnology in Ageing” in January 2020, using a community-based learning (CBL) approach. Instead of traditional lectures and exams, students co-designed assistive solutions with older adults from thirteen different community organisations involved in eldercare. Working in teams, students identified unmet needs with the seniors, defined technical specifications, prototyped solutions, and evaluated their effectiveness. These real-world, design-based projects served as authentic assessments and fostered higher-order learning, empathy, and user-centered design thinking. Over five course runs, 233 students created quality prototypes, many of which were adopted by seniors themselves or deployed in the community—such as the “Grip Buddy” for a stroke survivor, “OneCube” for monitoring the three highs and exergames like “Happy Feet” and “Grow Your Grip.” Several prototypes were further developed and scaled for wider use. In this talk, I will share how we integrate experiential learning and community co-design in engineering education that could lead to impactful, deployable innovations in gerontechnology.

Laura Fiorini

Assistant Professor, Università di Firenze

Can assistive social robots be used to stimulate physically and cognitively the frail person? Over the last years research efforts demonstrated that assistive robots can be used also to assess and rehabilitate frail people the paradigm of care shifting from human-therapist to human-robot-therapist, but which are the factors that can prevent the use of this technology in the wild?

Laura Fiorini is an assistant professor “Tenure Track” at the University of Florence, Department of Industrial Engineering, Florence, Italy. She received the M.Sc. Degree in Biomedical Engineering at University of Pisa in 2012 (full marks, cum laude). She obtained a Ph.D. in Biorobotics (full marks, cum laude) at the BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna, in 2016. In 2015 she visited the Bristol Robotics Laboratory at University of West England (Bristol, UK). From 2016 to 2020, she was post-doc researcher at the BioRobotics Institute and from 2020 to 2022 she was a post-doc at the University of Florence. She collaborated at different EU and national projects such as: Fit4Medical Robotics, Pharaon, Robot-Era, ACCRA, CloudIA and SI-ROBOTICS. Currently she is the coordinator of the Pharaon Italian Pilot and scientific responsible for DESTINI project. Her research interest is mainly focused on social robotics for assisting and supporting frail people with a special focus on the design and the evaluation of the prototype in real environments.

Nichole Lighthall

Associate Professor, University of Central Florida

Developing technology that optimally meets the needs of older adults requires an understanding of how aging impacts social, emotional, and cognitive processing. This presentation will provide an overview of age-related changes to social-emotional decision making and the mechanisms that drive such changes, including normal (organic) brain aging and age-related neurodegenerative disease, as well as shifts in social-emotional goals.

Dr. Nichole Lighthall is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Human Factors and Cognitive program at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, USA. She holds a B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, a Ph.D. in gerontology from the University of Southern California, and completed a postdoc in the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. The goal of her research is to develop a neural model of decision processing in human aging that can be used to identify age-related vulnerabilities and pathways to compensation. She is particularly interested in how age-related changes to cognitive and affective components of decision making impact decision processing and quality. In conducting this research, the Lighthall Lab utilizes an array of methodological approaches including cognitive tasks, manipulations of emotion and task difficulty, biomarker sampling, computational modeling, and functional neuroimaging. 

Sheng-Hung Lee

MIT Postdoc and IDSA Board Director

This presentation introduces the concept and experimental application of Design for Longevity (D4L), which evolved from design for retirement and financial planning. It reframes aging by shifting the focus from chronological age to life stage (Golden, 2022), encouraging a more dynamic and personalized understanding of longevity. The presentation further examines how this approach intersects with inclusive design principles (Holmes,2020) across various scales, ranging from accessible product and service design to urban planning and systemic interventions. Examples such as the implications of walkable cities (Speck, 2013) can illustrate how D4L can support more inclusive, age-ready, and sustainable built environments.

Sheng-Hung Lee, PhD, is a designer and engineer whose work bridges design, technology, and systems thinking to tackle complex societal challenges. A postdoc at MIT and incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, he focuses on service innovation, system design, and longevity planning. His research integrates grounded theory, causal loop diagrams, and design ethnography. Lee has served on the IDSA Board and WDO Education Committee, juried global design competitions, and taught internationally. His award-winning work has been exhibited worldwide. He holds a PhD in Human Behavior and Service Design from MIT.