The United Nations Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030) is a global collaboration that brings together governments, civil society, international agencies, professionals, academia, the media, and the private sector for ten years of concerted and collaborative action to improve the lives of older people, their families, and the communities in which they live. Creating age-friendly environments is an important determinant of healthy ageing and can be created by removing physical and social barriers and implementing policies, systems, services, products and technologies to enable people to continue to do the things they value.

Digital technologies including ambient assisted living and other care technologies have important roles in providing a continuum of support to enhance older adults’ functioning in a city or community’s social and environmental ecosystem. The WHO model of eight domains for age-friendly cities and communities provides a framework to integrate digital technological solutions to improve the lives of older adults and their care providers particularly within the cluster of domains addressing municipal services including communication and information (domain 7) to assist older adults in accessing timely, reliable, and understandable information about their community, ways of engagement, available services and health topics; and community and health services (domain 8) to improve long-term care systems as well as integration and better coordination of services.

The roundtable organized at the side event of the European week of active and healthy ageing conference will provide an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, practices and lessons learnt from the WHO European Healthy Cities Networks (HCN) as well as the WHO Global Networks of Age-friendly Cities and Communities (GNAFCC) to the regional and city level administrators participating in the conference. In particular, the roundtable will:

• give a rapid overview of the Decade of Healthy Ageing as well as WHO’s HCN and GNAFCC;

• briefly introduce some of the main tools for age-friendly environments as well as the Decade such as the online knowledge exchange Platform of the Decade;

• share experiences and examples of digital solutions from cities and communities on healthy ageing including lessons learnt to support older adults during the pandemic including the Nordic perspectives on age-friendly environments; and

• discuss synergies and engage all participants in identifying key opportunities for collaboration across Europe.