(Yicai) July 17 -- Shanghai has issued an action plan to speed up the innovative development of the elderly care industry and the opening of smart nursing homes using products including nursing and rehabilitation robots.

Shanghai will build demonstration areas for elderly care tech products, further trials of rehabilitation device renting services, include high-end elderly care products in renting catalogs, enhance insurance and guarantees, expand liability insurances for biomedicine human clinical trials, and drive applications of innovative elderly care products, according to the action plan released yesterday.

Moreover, the city will optimize the elderly care industry's development environment by recognizing a batch of high-end tech companies in the field, building a platform for communication between communities, institutions, and households, and offering online and offline services. It will also build high-quality incubators and research and development testing platforms to share achievements.

Shanghai aims to improve its ability to overcome technological barriers, enhance product development, and build service platforms, as well as develop artificial intelligence models and algorithms based on voice, face, emotion, and movement recognition and surrounding sensing to increase elderly care innovative products' capabilities to feel, learn, make decision, and execute orders.

Shanghai expects to complete the construction of a highland for elderly care tech innovation and industry development by 2027, which would include an elderly care tech industrial park, one or two high-quality incubators, three to five tech innovation centers, one or two public R&D testing service platforms, five to 10 leading firms, and a basic elderly care services platform serving an average of over five million senior citizens per year.

The elderly care industrial park has a planned area of about 13,000 square meters and is divided into two functional regions for innovation R&D and industry carrier, Chen Hongming, deputy director of the science and technology commission of Shanghai's Minhang district, said at a briefing on July 15.

Editor: Futura Costaglione