Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly used to support independent living and care for older adults, particularly those in vulnerable situations. Yet, how vulnerability is constructed when AI enters later-life care remains poorly theorized. Existing approaches to vulnerability in old age inadequately address AI-related risks, structural conditions, exposure pathways, and life course disadvantages. Using a theory-synthesis approach, this article proposes "vulnerability intersections" as an integrative framework for how vulnerability is constructed, enacted, and negotiated in AI-assisted care for older adults. The framework extends existing sociotechnical accounts by conceptualizing vulnerability as taking four overlapping forms: anticipatory, opaque, routinized, and normative. It locates vulnerability factors at the micro level of older adults' lives, the meso level of care organizations and technology providers, and the macro level of political-economic and regulatory arrangements, with life-course accumulation spanning all three. It also proposes three exposure pathways through which vulnerability factors become consequential: AI-mediated information and representations of aging; AI-powered care organization and delivery; and AI-configured power, participation, and social relations. The framework shifts attention away from viewing older adults as inherently vulnerable toward examining the sociotechnical arrangements under which vulnerability is anticipated, classified, distributed, and negotiated when AI enters care.

Enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI) that continuously infers emotion promises to change how care systems identify older adults at risk of loneliness. We use AI-driven loneliness detection to mean systems that infer loneliness, or a proxy for it, from sensed data rather than from a person's answer, rendering the inference as a score or category used in care; they range from facial and vocal emotion recognition to behavioral risk prediction from everyday activity data. Engineering feasibility, more than any social-gerontological understanding of loneliness, has driven this agenda, and little attention has gone to how older adults in different cultural contexts wish to be known and supported. Because such detection is not yet in routine use in Taiwan, this Forum article adopts an anticipatory-governance stance, examining before deployment a trajectory that policy makes plausible. Anchored in Taiwan's ageing society and long-term care system, it argues that culturally responsive design should begin with older adults' own meanings, relational obligations, and expectations of privacy and autonomy, not with the sensors. It identifies three tensions for social gerontology: the reframing of a relational experience as an individual biometric deficit; the risk that algorithms read culturally patterned emotional restraint as noise; and the slippage from care toward surveillance once risk indices enter routine care workflows. Taking seriously the case for technological augmentation of scarce care resources, the article proposes principles for a socially accountable approach and a research agenda on how older adults negotiate being sensed, scored, and 'connected.'

In many countries, population aging and increasing rates of housing security among older people are unfolding simultaneously. While the World Health Organization's Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (AFCC) framework is largely considered the leading framework for developing age-supportive communities, it does not adequately account for the ways in which a community may be inclusive, supportive, or age-friendly for older people with lived experience of housing insecurity. This paper began with a question: What would an age-friendly community look like for older people with experiences of housing insecurity? Drawing on the Aging in the Right Place (AIRP) framework, a rights-based conceptual model of six indicators developed through community-based participatory research, this paper re-examines and extends each of the WHO AFCC framework's eight domains: housing, transportation, social participation, respect and social inclusion, civic participation, communication and information, community support and health services, and outdoor spaces and buildings. This paper argues that age-friendly approaches must recognize housing as a human right and housing security as a cornerstone of age-friendly communities, requiring protections including rent control, eviction prevention, and incentives for non-market housing development. Recommendations are offered for municipalities seeking to embed AIRP and rights-based perspectives into age-friendly strategies and evaluation.

Compared to other age groups, older adults are often marginalized in the design processes of digital technologies leading to digital and social exclusion. While these aspects have been discussed in several reviews, an overarching perspective on how older adults are involved in Participatory Approaches (PA) in technology and innovation development is currently missing. This scoping review of reviews provides an overarching view on the narratives, trends, and gaps in PA in different fields of innovation, and proposes future research and practice directions. The study followed the Arksey & O'Malley's protocol for scoping reviews and the PRISMA-ScR checklist as the reporting guideline. Seven databases were screened for studies with a thematic focus on older adults, applying PA in technology and technology-related innovation, and published between 2014-2024. Twenty-two reviews were included. PA with older adults have seemingly evolved over the years with an increased focus on values equity, empowerment, power-sharing, and mutual learning. Nevertheless, deficit narratives on aging and ageism still constrain meaningful participation. A "participation gap" persists in which: terminology remains inconsistent; older adults are predominantly assigned roles of informants or testers rather than co-designers or equal partners; methods are mainly data-extractive; marginalized subgroups remain systematically underrepresented; and the technology scope remains predominantly care-centric. Identified gaps highlight the need for standardizing meaningful participation by creating a seal of quality for participatory approaches, improved reporting, and stronger inclusion of underrepresented populations and life domains of older persons.

This manuscript analyzes the literary, social and cultural representations of dementia in Antjie Krog's Blood's Inner Rhyme (2025) and Julia Martin's The Blackridge House (2019). I contend that the authors' accounts of their mothers' struggle with dementia, from its onset to its end, function as living archives of personal and national history. I employ life writing, aging studies, and, to a lesser extent, historiography to examine the literary, social cultural, and historical dimensions of such experiences. I address the narrative construction of the mothers' identity in later life by highlighting the role of archives and family memories in the context of contemporary South Africa. Thus, I aim to illustrate the instrumental role of life narratives in the creation of safe spaces for intergenerational dialogue and reconciliation with a troubled past on a personal and national level. I also contend that humanities-based inquiry brings to the fore the essential aspects of later life, thereby challenging the pathologizing medical in the representation of dementia, which often disregards the reality of old people as vessels of knowledge. Eventually, I showcase that illness life narratives function as accessible repositories of public knowledge that render visible the realities of aging.