One of the challenges in response to population aging is to meet needs for elderly care among older people especially for those who want to age in their homes or communities. However, disabled older people have more challenges due to their restricted mobility to access care resources than non-disabled ones. We propose a new framework based on the changing relationship between older people and their environment, in which resource linkage in elderly care utilization is emphasized. We conducted a survey with 139 participants (i.e., older people age 60 years or over with different level of disabilities) in three types of neighborhoods in Beijing, China. By conducting a decision tree analysis under the Person-Environment Link (P-E Link) model, we (1) characterized unmet needs for elderly care (activities of daily living (ADL) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) assistance) among community-dwelling disabled older people; (2) found disabled older people had more unmet needs for both ADL and IADL assistance because of a lack in linkages to care resources than non-disabled ones; and (3) characterized the linkages to care resources for better supporting disabled older people to age in place, including family support, social connection, and spatial environment. Our findings help improve the Anderson behavioral model by characterizing enabling environments, which highlights that not only the availability of enabling resources but also linkages to these enabling resources play an important role in meeting needs for care among disabled older people. Our findings can also inform improvements in policy design that are targeted to reduce elderly care inequalities.

In many Western countries, geographic studies on long-term care for the elderly originated from geriatrics and nursing science, and then from the sub-fields of medical geography, health geography, and disability geography, and care geography-a new interdisciplinary field has emerged. Medicine, health, disability, and health care are core issues in the studies on the changing geography of elderly care, which has focused increasingly more on long-term care in recent years. Based on an intensive review of Western literature, this article extracts five themes from existing geographic studies on long-term care for the elderly, that is, the geographical distribution of long-term care needs of the elderly, the accessibility of care facilities and change, the use of long-term care and barriers for the utilization, the care experience of people in relation to space and place, and discussion on long-term care policies. In recent years, Chinese geographers have been paying more attention to the aging problem. However, the research perspective has been still relatively narrow and few academic papers have been published in the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) library so far. Geographic research on long-term care for the disabled elderly is a brand new field. Given the substantial amount of disabled elderly population in increasing proportions, long-term care provision has become the key issue and major focus of the elderly support system in China. Thus it is of high scientific value and urgent practical needs to carry out geographic research on long-term care for the elderly. It may not be unreasonable to suggest that researchers provide geographic perspectives to their research with regard to the socioeconomic backgrounds, policy demand, and research foci in China. Through a comparative study of the Chinese and Western contexts, the emphases of research in the future are proposed with the aim to develop deeper insights for elderly long-term care policies in China, including geographic database, theories, and research system construction.

Big data has been prominent in studying aging and older people’s health. It has promoted modeling and analyses in biological and geriatric research (like cellular senescence), developed health management platforms, and supported decision-making in public healthcare and social security. However, current studies are still limited within a single subject, rather than flourished as interdisciplinary research in the context of big data. The research perspectives have not changed, nor has big data brought itself out of the role as a modeling tool. When embedding big data as a data product, analysis tool, and resolution service into different spatial, temporal, and organizational scales of aging processes, it would present as a connection, integration, and interaction simultaneously in conducting interdisciplinary research. Therefore, this paper attempts to propose an ecological framework for big data based on aging and older people’s health research. Following the scoping process of PRISMA, 35 studies were reviewed to validate our ecological framework. Although restricted by issues like digital divides and privacy security, we encourage researchers to capture various elements and their interactions in the human-environment system from a macro and dynamic perspective rather than simply pursuing accuracy.