An elderly resident named Fu Ming (pseudonym) from Binxilou Community on Youyi Road Subdistrict in Tianjin's Hexi District recently tripped and injured his knee on his way home. In a panic, he immediately contacted the intelligent service terminal at the Wenyuanlou Home-Based Elderly Care Service Center. Li Minglei, a care specialist on duty, received the alert remotely and rushed to the scene to provide timely assistance.

To date, Zhongmin Jukang (Tianjin) Elderly Care Industry Development Co., Ltd., where Li Minglei works, has built a team of 67 eldercare specialists serving over 40,000 seniors. In July 2025, the role of eldercare specialist was officially added to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security's new occupational catalog. As the aging society continues to drive demand for professional elderly care services, this emerging profession is becoming a vital force safeguarding the twilight years of seniors in urban communities across the country.

Despite covering just 48.17 square kilometers, Hexi District is home to a significant elderly population. Through years of exploration in eldercare services, the district has successfully developed multiple new-style service hubs operated by enterprises—home-based care centers—and has cultivated numerous eldercare specialists through public-private collaboration to deliver innovative home-care solutions tailored to the aging demographic.

Zhongmin Jukang has been active in the home-based eldercare sector for over a decade. Chairman Zhan Hengbo admits the industry previously leaned heavily on care butlers who primarily attended to seniors' everyday needs like meals and daily living. Over time, the limitations of this conventional model surfaced, including a heavy dependence on personal experience, minimal familiarity with professional geriatric theory or smart technologies, and constraints on both the scope of services and number of individuals that could be assisted.

It is precisely against this market backdrop that specialists like Li Minglei—who blend technical expertise, theoretical knowledge, and hands-on service skills—have risen to prominence. From Li's perspective, those entering this new profession must first harness internet and AI technologies to address the pain points inherent in conventional eldercare.

At the Yuexiu Road Subdistrict Home-Based Elderly Care Service Center, a three-tier system jointly developed by Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Zhongmin Jukang—comprising a regional care hub, community service stations, and household service units—has emerged as a favored destination for seniors' health maintenance, shopping, and leisure. Li Lishi (pseudonym), an elderly resident living alone, expressed his delight: "While listening to crosstalk on the smart terminal, I can also use it to shop—it's incredibly convenient."

Care specialist Liu Baoyang handles in-home installation and calibration of these smart devices, teaching older adults to use voice commands for music, storytelling, and other entertainment. Through simple screen taps, seniors can access meal delivery, purchasing, bathing assistance, home visits, and health consultations. In emergencies, a single button press connects them directly to their designated care specialist, effectively merging both recreational engagement and emergency safeguards into one platform.

Currently, Yuexiu Road Subdistrict has deployed 2,480 of these speaker-shaped smart terminals, with senior usage activity exceeding 90%. Liu Baoyang, who has worked at the center for over ten years, noted: "Beyond foundational care skills, we also need to master the operation and upkeep of the service system itself."

The regional hub acts as the operation's core command center, responsible for unified coordination, data platform construction, AI-driven dispatch, and real-time monitoring across the entire service chain. AI-enabled community stations cover surrounding neighborhoods at close range, providing meal services, shopping support, in-home visits, and emergency response. Household units are tailored to each senior's health profile with smart screens, millimeter-wave radar, intelligent mattresses, and health-check devices.

"Seniors can simply voice their needs. The spoken input is processed through a data model and intent-recognition program before being routed to relevant backend systems for action," explained care specialist Wang Ying. At present, applications covering meal ordering, shopping, medical support, live streaming, Q&A, health management, and digital-physician services are live, spanning emotional companionship, home assistance, and wellness management. These invisible digital assistants are becoming indispensable aids to eldercare specialists.

"The essence of these AI tools is bridging seniors' homes, community services, and care operations through intelligent means. Operators can access a unified dashboard to review resident profiles, service demands, and order updates, while AI assistants help specialists handle high-frequency tasks. Such technological adoption lays a solid foundation for broadening coverage and elevating efficiency, advancing a full-time, full-chain, all-encompassing ecosystem for aged care," said Zhang Hua, solution architect for smart eldercare at Baidu Intelligent Cloud.