Elderly individuals with similar abilities are likely to have similar care needs. Abilities are the basis for analysing the need patterns of elderly individuals. Abilities of elderly individuals are both numerical and categorical; therefore, an improved K-prototypes cluster algorithm for mixed attributes was proposed to group elderly individuals based on abilities. In this algorithm, the dissimilarity measure of categorical attributes is designed to consider not only the difference between the object to be allocated and the prototype of the cluster but also the differ6ence between the object to be allocated and other objects in the cluster and can measure the difference in sequential values of ordinal categorical attributes. Experimental results show that the improved K-prototypes algorithm performs well for clustering datasets containing mixed attributes. Taking the CHARLS dataset as an example, distinct groups of elderly individuals based on the improved K-prototypes algorithm showed significant ability differences.