The “ELDERDES” model
How older adults’ adoption of digital environment solutions improves residential experiences, health outcomes, and enables independent living
Around the world, people are living longer, but many spend their final decade coping with chronic illness, mobility limitations, sensory loss, and cognitive decline. Their social networks shrink as spouses and friends die, fall ill, move away, or divorces occur. This persistent lifespan–healthspan gap is the focus of today’s aging policies and practices.
Older adults facing these realities ask a deceptively simple question: Does where I live still work for me? Their concerns are well-founded.
Once desirable homes, neighborhoods, and communities become unsafe or exhausting to access, especially for those living alone. Stairs become barriers. Bathrooms feel risky. Getting to doctors, shopping, or social activities becomes difficult.
As activity spaces contract to the home, stress rises, new health stressors emerge, and independent living becomes challenging.
Against this backdrop, Dr. Golant’s paper presents a conceptual framework showing how AI-powered digital environment solutions are reshaping what it means to age in the right place.
He argues that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift: health-challenged older adults can transform their homes into environmental monitoring hubs and digital control centers. Specifically, four categories of Digital Environment Solutions (DES) now help them proactively manage housing mismatches and health risks.
The critical issue, however, is not whether these technologies exist but what drives their adoption. The ELDERDES model emphasizes that older adults follow multiple decision-making pathways shaped by individual differences, perceived stress, unmet needs, alternative coping strategies, and evaluations of benefits, usability, and risks, often in comparison with traditional care, services, or travel options.
Provocatively, the paper argues that the “digital environment” has two distinct components: digital equipment and digital destinations. These components require different skills to use, confer different benefits, and explain why older adults embrace some technologies while rejecting others. Digital literacy emerges as a core, modifiable marker of late-life competence.
Dr. Golant’s takeaway is intentionally uncomfortable: we cannot rely solely on making neighborhoods and communities more age-friendly. We must devote greater energy to confronting the young-old digital divide by making digital environment solutions more relevant, usable, risk-free, and affordable for older adults navigating their healthspan–lifespan gaps.
Golant, S. M. (2026). The “ELDERDES” model: how older adults’ adoption of digital environment solutions improves residential experiences, health outcomes, and enables independent living. Frontiers in Public Health, 14, 1724293.
Photo by Cristina Gottardi on Unsplash.