On 22 May 2026, the General Office of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology(MIIT) issued the Notice on Conducting the 2026 “Digital Aging-Friendly China Tour” Activity. Running from May to December 2026 under the theme “Digital Aging-Friendly, Smart Living,” the initiative operates based on the Barrier-Free Environment Development Law of the People’s Republic of China (2023), reflecting China’s push to close the digital divide for its aging population.
The notice spotlights standardization in three areas:
- First, it mandates centralized promotion of laws, policies, and standards related to digital technology aging-friendliness, signaling a tighter coupling between China’s 2023 accessibility legislation and sector-specific technical norms.
- Second, the notice highlights quality improvement through standards as a key mechanism for upgrading elderly-friendly services in healthcare, transport, and payment systems. Specific use cases include voice-only ride-hailing interfaces, one-tap verification-free operations for low-risk transactions, and dedicated senior mobile-payment channels, all intended for standardized, scalable deployment across platforms rather than isolated pilot projects.
- Third, the notice identifies multimodal interaction systems, AI-assisted decision-making, and barrier-free information recognition as key R&D priorities, while encouraging frontier applications of embodied intelligence and VR/AR in assistive products. Telecom operators are also tasked with improving offline service channels, including dedicated senior counters and priority hotlines, alongside digital upgrades. The activity further calls for public-benefit technical platforms for accessibility retrofitting, suggesting a move toward standardized infrastructure for compliance testing and certification.
Standards-driven quality improvement has become a defining feature of China’s standardization reform. As population aging and AI transition accelerate, digital aging-friendliness is now a standardization priority for the silver economy. CAICT, a leading research institution on information accessibility, is named among the key implementing units. The activity is expected to feed directly into China’s standard-setting pipeline for ICT accessibility, producing technical norms that will shape compliance benchmarks for internet applications and smart devices.
Source: https://www.miit.gov.cn/jgsj/xgj/wjfb/art/2026/art_ed6aa7f5ad554b71991e26c4af95a1be.html
