Is a long, lonely life a blessing or a torment? Among the 323 million elderly people, 26.4% are plagued by depression: Airun Xinling intends to use AI to fill the neglected puzzle piece of "psychological age".
For the problem that high-quality, anytime, anywhere, continuous daily mental health support and emotional companionship for the elderly are hard to obtain, Airun Xinling is developing an AI-native elderly psychological care service. The project adheres to the principle of not carrying out "technical education" for the elderly, plans to adopt WeChat, telephone and other interactive entrances familiar to the elderly in daily life as the main interaction portals, follows the psychological characteristics of the elderly, upholds a positive view on aging, combines AI companion agents with professional psychology, so that every elderly person can be noticed, listened to, understood, accompanied 7*24 hours a day, and can have things to do and things to enjoy. At present, the team is seeking early-stage financing and cooperation, and the funds are planned to be used for product R&D, psychological safety mechanism construction and institutional scenario cooperation.
Structural Supply-Demand Gap for Psychological Care and Emotional Companionship in the Longevity Era
Is a long life accompanied by loneliness and unhappiness a blessing or a torture for an elderly person?
Data from the National Bureau of Statistics shows that by the end of 2025, China's population aged 60 and above was about 323 million, accounting for 23% of the total population. The whole country has entered a moderately aging society, with an annual average increase of about 10 million. The speed and scale of population aging far exceed those of developed countries. It is expected that the elderly population will exceed 400 million by 2035, and China will enter a severely aging society.
At the same time, China is also showing a trend of low fertility and smaller family size, leading to an explosive growth in the number of elderly people living alone. At present, the number of empty-nest elderly has exceeded 180 million. In addition, according to the *2024 China Aging Development Report — Mental Health Status of the Elderly in China*, 23.76% of the elderly in China have varying degrees of loneliness, and 26.4% of the elderly have varying degrees of depressive symptoms. Meanwhile, psychosocial isolation is one of the key biological markers that accelerate the aging process (*CELL*, July 2025).
According to incomplete statistics disclosed by public media, the Airun Xinling team also found that more than 80% of capital and public social investment in the silver economy track has been put into the direction of "physiological age" longevity, such as anti-aging medical treatment, chronic disease management, rehabilitation nursing, health monitoring, elderly-friendly hardware and other physical health fields. However, there are relatively few public data on investment and resource input in the "psychological age" field that determines the well-being of the elderly, such as mental health, emotional companionship and spiritual comfort.
From the perspective of Airun Xinling, the body of an 80-year-old cannot have the physique of a 20-year-old, but the mind of a 90-year-old can revert to that of a 20-year-old teenager. The physiological age cannot be reversed, and what is truly reversible and makes people happy for life is the abundance of psychological age. At the same time, spiritual or psychological well-being can in turn act on the physiological age, either accelerating aging or prolonging life. With the improvement of medical treatment, health management and care conditions, while extending life expectancy, whether the elderly have someone to communicate with every day, can maintain interests and social connections, and still have the feeling of being needed, are all specific demands in their long-term daily life. Airun Xinling hopes to start from these high-frequency demands to supplement the psychological and emotional support in existing elderly care services.
In addition, the state has also noticed this huge supply-demand gap, and has successively introduced various policies to promote the satisfaction of the elderly's demands for spiritual comfort, emotional companionship and mental health. For example, in June 2026, 8 departments including the Ministry of Commerce issued the *Implementation Opinions on Accelerating the Development of "AI + Consumption"*, which put forward requirements such as "improving capabilities including emotional companionship", and promoted the verification and iteration of smart products in families, communities and elderly care institutions. The *15th Five-Year Plan for National Health* issued by the State Council in July 2026 also mentioned "implementing health promotion actions in elderly psychological care, dementia prevention and treatment and other fields". The *Three-Year Action Plan for "AI + Elderly Care" in Haidian District (2026-2028)* of Beijing also clearly pointed out that "for the core scenario demands of emotional companionship and mental health, we will widely issue 'hero posts', encourage AI enterprises and scientific research teams to carry out technical research, invite representatives of the elderly group and disabled experience officers to participate in demand demonstration and achievement testing, and support the recommendation of key research achievements to be included in the map of science and technology elderly care enterprises in Haidian District".
Therefore, Airun Xinling sets its service targets as the elderly with relevant demands, covering scenarios such as home, communities and elderly care institutions. The elderly living alone, empty-nest elderly and elderly who move to new cities with their children are the key concern groups, and the elderly living with their families may also need psychological support. For communities and elderly care institutions, one activity or one return visit can hardly cover long-term demands, and the staff also need to complete situation records, follow-up of key targets and resource coordination. After the number of service recipients increases, continuous care puts higher requirements on manpower and management.
Build Uninterrupted, High-Quality Emotional Companionship and Mental Health Protection with AI-Native Services
In the AI-native service built by Airun Xinling, the agent matrix undertakes the understanding and generation of dialogues, the voice capability supports telephone and voice communication, and the system connects long-term memory, personality construction, professional psychological content, chat scripts, active care, risk warning and manual psychological intervention task scheduling to organize a continuous AI-native service process.
At the elderly user end, Airun Xinling insists on minimizing "technical education" for the elderly, taking WeChat and telephone as the main entrances, and elderly-friendly hardware as the terminals that can be accessed subsequently, so as to reduce the burden on the elderly of purchasing additional equipment or learning complex technologies. At the elderly user end, the planned capabilities include chat companionship, interest content, matter reminders and safety confirmation. The system retains necessary personal preferences and communication information within the scope of user authorization, so that subsequent dialogues can continue the previous topics.
For the elderly who are fond of opera, history or gardening, the product plans to provide corresponding topics and content, and connect suitable community activities. Focusing on cognitive training support, the team plans to provide memory, attention and language training activities, and explore auxiliary observation of clues of cognitive changes from long-term communication. Relevant capabilities need to be verified for the elderly group, and the clues need to be manually verified and professionally evaluated. The product does not undertake disease diagnosis or treatment.
At the institutional end, the team plans to sort out service clues that need attention through the workbench, and assign return visits, verification, activity organization and resource connection to corresponding personnel. For example, when the elderly continuously express low mood or put forward specific requests for help, the system shall transmit necessary information to authorized service personnel, who will further understand the situation, arrange support and record the processing results manually.
Professional psychological capabilities will be applied to content design, dialogue strategy, risk classification and evaluation. The product needs to understand the emotions of the elderly, while maintaining the boundaries of facts and relationships, avoiding echoing unsubstantiated judgments or inducing dependence, and encouraging the elderly to maintain real social connections. Different response methods are adopted for daily emotional expression and emergency risks. When psychological crisis or medical problems are involved, personnel with corresponding professional capabilities, medical institutions or emergency assistance shall be connected.
The *Interim Measures for the Administration of AI Anthropomorphic Interactive Services*, which came into effect on July 15, 2026, encourages applications such as elderly-friendly companionship, and puts forward requirements for mental health protection, emotional boundary guidance, over-dependence risk warning and elderly user help response. Airun Xinling plans to implement these requirements into products, safety evaluation, data permissions and manual response processes.
The supporting manual services are undertaken by the elderly psychological care instructor network planned and constructed by the team. AI is responsible for high-frequency daily interactions, and trained service personnel follow up with multiple elderly people through the workbench, devoting time to links that require judgment and practical actions. 100,000 psychological care instructors are the long-term goal of network construction, and the actual service capacity and personnel allocation will be gradually verified according to task intensity, response requirements and risk levels. Airun Xinling regards the elderly as service users, and takes community elderly care service operators, elderly care institutions, retiree service departments of enterprises and public institutions, trade unions and public welfare organizations as important cooperation channels. Cooperation partners connect specific groups of people with local service resources, and the project provides the agent service system, professional content, institutional workbench and supporting training.
The Airun Xinling team covers interdisciplinary fields such as geriatric psychology, brain science, algorithms, and AI applications. Zhang Xin, the founder of Airun Xinling, graduated from Peking University, with dual backgrounds in brain science and computer science. He once worked at IBM, 360, Tencent, and served as Vice President of Product of 100 Education, having incubated dozens of product lines, using AI and mobile Internet to amplify the capabilities of teachers and excellent educational content, and providing personalized educational content and services that are unique to hundreds of cities, thousands of schools and tens of thousands of teachers.
In terms of industry-university-research cooperation in geriatric psychology, according to the team, founder Zhang Xin, Professor Zhang Xin from the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences of Peking University, and Feng Hailan from the Chinese University of Hong Kong jointly promote the research project of AI companionship in the field of geriatric psychology, and co-authored the geriatric psychology book *Ageless Years: New Interpretations of Life in the Longevity Era*, which is planned to be published by China Machine Press in the near future.
At the current stage, Airun Xinling is advancing product design, professional content construction and test preparation around the above service framework. The team plans to observe the continuous use of the elderly, the completion of manual responses and the unit service cost through pilots in community and elderly care scenarios, so as to verify the institutional procurement demand. This round of financing will be used for team building, R&D of agents and voice interaction, psychological safety evaluation, pilot delivery and service team construction, to gradually form an elderly psychological care solution that can be adopted by different institutions.