JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Globally, various ageing concepts (such as healthy ageing, successful ageing, and active ageing) have emerged to promote the goal of "ageing well” and have gained widespread attention in academia, policy, and practice to change the negative narrative on ageing. However, whether and how these ageing concepts have contributed to the change of the negative narratives remains unclear. Moreover, they are not clearly defined nor widely agreed upon, often creating ambiguity and confusion. This paper provides a comprehensive review and a thorough comparison of all 16 ageing concepts, with particular attention given to the research evolvement of these ageing concepts. The Bibliometric tool of VosViewer was employed to visualise country collaboration networks and co-citation networks of journals. Additionally, the corpus linguistics software AntConc was used to assist the content analysis of examining and comparing the main focuses, applications, challenges, and future research directions of these concepts. The findings indicate that while all 16 ageing concepts share the common goal of improving the quality of life for older adults, different perspectives have been contributed by each concept to research on ageing, including health management, social participation, mental health, and technological innovation. Challenges in achieving the goal of these ageing concepts, such as unequal access to healthcare resources, barriers to social participation, and difficulties in adopting technology, were identified. Future efforts should focus on advancing technology, optimising policies, enhancing social support systems, and fostering global collaboration to provide innovative and sustainable solutions to the overall well-being of older adults.