Research on the Scenario Suspension Mechanism of Smart Community-Based Elderly Care: A Case Study of J Community in T City

Abstract

In light of the ageing of the population and continuous progress in digital governance, intelligent community-based elderly care has been added to the reform plan for grassroots public services. However, in some communities, even after the construction of platforms, devices and service projects, problems such as low use, weak service coordination and inadequate collaborative governance persist. Drawing on embeddedness theory, this paper proposes the concept of "scenario suspension" and selects J Community in T City as the research subject. Three typical cases of smart elderly care are selected: health management, meal assistance and voluntary mutual aid, and their corresponding de-embedding phenomena in routine operation after system construction are analysed. Based on the above study, the operational difficulties of smart elderly care in J Community are mainly due to technology failures, service disruptions and governance deficiencies. Smart facilities have been brought into the community, but they have not yet been stably integrated into the health management system; although the meal-assistance platform can perform online record-keeping and settlement, offline delivery, feedback and improvement mechanisms are still lacking; and while the voluntary mutual-help platform has formed a basic process, community trust, participation incentives and multi-actor coordination are still weak. The reason is that the factors of technology, institutions and relationships have not been effectively integrated into the daily life of older adults and the service supply chain or community governance network. Therefore, this paper puts forward the three ways of technological re-embedding, institutional re-embedding and relational re-embedding to promote the transformation of smart community-based elderly care from a "constructed system" to a "stable operation".