JMIR Aging

Continuous advancements in voice artificial intelligence technologies aim to assist older adults and caregivers, potentially improving quality of life and reducing caregiving burdens. Although research has explored the potential of voice-enabled artificial intelligence (VAI) assistants, such as Alexa (Amazon.com, Inc) and Google Home, to support older adults’ health in informal care settings, there remains a significant gap in understanding the ethical dimensions and values that may influence their future adoption by caregivers and care recipients.

Higher step width variability while walking is associated with poor physical function and falls. Sleep is an established modifiable risk factor for both gait and physical function impairments, but it remains to be examined whether sleep is also related to step width variability.

Postoperative frailty is highly prevalent among older adults undergoing hip surgery and is closely linked to poor clinical outcomes. Despite growing interest in understanding its progression, the temporal patterns of frailty remain underexplored. Moreover, there is a lack of validated models that can predict frailty trajectories and stratify patients by risk in the early postoperative period.

Access to geriatric mental health (GMH) care is limited in rural areas. To meet this need, the Veterans Health Administration provides specialty tele-GMH care for aging rural veterans via regional telehealth hubs.

Everyday listening ability is essential for individual health and well-being. Age-related hearing loss (ARHL) is associated with reduced communication engagement, social isolation, loneliness, cognitive decline, and increased dementia risk. Interventions that simultaneously target auditory processing and cognitive function, particularly within engaging and ecologically valid contexts, may offer greater benefits than unimodal approaches. However, culturally adapted, web-based, gamified auditory-cognitive dual-task training (ACDT) tailored for older adults with ARHL remains underexplored. At the time of this writing, few auditory or auditory-cognitive training programs are available in Chinese languages, creating linguistic and cultural barriers for older adults.

Home telemonitoring programs are increasingly used to support older adults living with chronic conditions such as heart failure (HF). While these interventions show promise for improving health outcomes and reducing care burden, their effectiveness depends largely on how patients and caregivers integrate digital technologies into everyday life and care relationships. However, relatively few studies have examined these experiences using conceptual frameworks that capture both functional and relational dimensions of care.

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation (SDMC), the process by which sleep supports the transfer of memories into long-term storage, declines with age but remains underexplored in older adults with subjective cognitive decline and mild cognitive impairment. Traditional SDMC assessments are typically conducted in lab settings, with limited evidence for feasibility to do these assessments at home for this clinical population.

As the global population ages, the increasing number of individuals with chronic conditions places a growing burden on family caregivers. Behavioral interventions delivered via application-based platforms, including those on mobile phones, tablets, or the web, have emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing caregiver support.

Climate change has intensified the frequency and duration of extreme heat events worldwide, posing growing public health risks, particularly for older adults who are physiologically more susceptible to heat-related illnesses. Concurrently, alcohol consumption among older adults in the United States has risen significantly over the past 2 decades, increasing vulnerability to dehydration, cardiovascular strain, and cognitive impairment during heat exposure. Emerging evidence suggests that environmental stressors such as extreme heat may exacerbate maladaptive coping behaviors, including alcohol use; however, few studies have examined this association in aging populations. Moreover, little is known about how early-life experiences such as childhood adversity or positive parental relationships shape behavioral responses to environmental stressors later in life.

Dementia caregiving entails chronic, fluctuating stress with downstream risks to caregivers’ mental health and quality of care. Mindfulness-based interventions can reduce caregiver stress; however, moment-to-moment fluctuations in stress may limit receptivity to practice at any given time. We developed a brief mindfulness just-in-time adaptive intervention (JITAI) that aims to deliver support at the right moment by using machine learning algorithms to optimize notification timing based on receptivity to engage in brief mindfulness practices.

Medication regimen simplification has gained increasing attention as a strategy to reduce treatment burden and improve medication use. However, the overall development, knowledge structure, and emerging themes of this field have not been systematically mapped, hindering efforts to identify clear research priorities and support strategies that facilitate the translation of simplified approaches into optimized medication management.

Prior research has rarely explored the link between sleep duration trajectories and cardiovascular disease (CVD) either in cross-sectional or longitudinal data.