As the global population ages and technology advances faster than ever, the USC Leonard Davis School of Gerontology leads the exploration of how cutting-edge tech—paired with gerontology expertise—can address aging’s biggest challenges.
The USC Age Tech Symposium, held March 28, 2025, featured presenters from academia, industry, venture capital, public policy, and beyond. As part of the school’s 50th anniversary celebration, the event also served as a bold statement of purpose: that USC, and particularly the Leonard Davis School, is positioning itself as the global epicenter for Age Tech innovation over the next five decades and beyond.
Technology will continue to accelerate and influence our ability to understand human disease and intervene in all areas of care, and USC is poised to provide comprehensive, interdisciplinary leadership in a rapidly changing landscape, said Steven Shapiro, USC Senior Vice President for Health Affairs.
“The future’s bright, and USC wants to be a big part of that future,” he said. “We’re structured so that all of our health science schools and health system are together, so we can develop interprofessional education, team-based care, do research collectively, and really transform healthcare.”
The Demographic Imperative
Pinchas Cohen, Dean of the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology and USC Distinguished Professor of Gerontology, Medicine and Biological Sciences, opened the symposium by framing the stakes in stark terms.
“We are already at a crisis in terms of caregiving,” he said. “We must leverage technology to support aging populations.”
Dean Pinchas Cohen
Pointing to demographic data, Cohen explained how the world’s population has shifted dramatically in just the past 50 years, with longer life expectancies and declining birth rates transforming the population pyramid—with a smaller number of older adults at its peak—into a rectangle topped by older people outnumbering those under age 18.
It’s this backdrop that makes the Age Tech market such a critical frontier. Investment in the sector has surged in recent years, with over $2.5 billion annually flowing into startups and innovation hubs. The potential, Cohen emphasized, is staggering.
“We expect this market to grow into a $2 trillion annual industry in the coming decades,” he said.
A Hub for Interdisciplinary Innovation
One of the most important messages of the day was that no single discipline can solve the challenges of aging alone. True breakthroughs, speakers emphasized, will come from the intersection of technology and humanity.
That message was echoed by Yannis Yortsos, Dean of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who described the collaboration between engineering and gerontology as a “double helix”—two complementary strands that must intertwine to generate progress.
Dean Yannis Yortsos
“We are in a unique time in which we can combine the tremendous advances that are going on in computing with all the challenges that we have,” Yortsos said. “I think this is going to be the narrative of our time: how technology and humanity interact and why it’s important that we have trustworthiness about it.”
This vision is already being realized through USC’s new interdisciplinary programs, including the Master of Science in Applied Technology and Aging. Launched just a few years ago, the program celebrated its first graduate in 2024 and now has 18 enrolled students. It aims to train a new generation of leaders fluent in both the science of aging and the application of advanced technology.
“Our goal is not just to have a degree, but to make USC a hub of Age Tech—a leading force in aging and technology with educational programs, with fundamental research, translation, fostering and incubating technologies, and serving as the nexus of academia, industry and investment partners in this field,” Cohen said.
USC’s first MSATA graduate, Dori Redman, completed her master’s while working full-time in senior living operations and said the program “blew away all my expectations.” She attended the symposium and described Age Tech as a “very exciting” field to be in.
“We need to have things in place to support our older adults … we’re all going to be living longer,” she said. “Whether you’re coming from a medical standpoint, a technical standpoint, or an operations standpoint like I did, it’s just really a great place to be right now.”
Designing for, Not Just Around, Older Adults
Keynote speaker Keren Etkin, gerontologist and author of The Age Tech Revolution, joined the symposium virtually from Israel, where she is also founder of the AgeLab at Shenkar College. Etkin reminded the audience that designing technology for older adults requires far more than accessibility—it demands inclusion from the ground up.
“I like to define ‘Age Tech’ as technology that’s not just designed to take on the challenges of aging but also includes older adults and other stakeholders, like family caregivers and elder care professionals, in the design process,” Etkin said. “I believe that is critical part of the definition, and we can’t create new solutions without these stakeholders.
Etkin highlighted examples of companies creating everything from AI-powered fall detection systems to robotic pill dispensers and caregiver support platforms. She also warned against assuming that older adults are tech-averse.
“Older adults are adopting technology in increasingly growing numbers,” she said. “However, most older adults still would say that they need help using new devices, and most would also not define themselves as early adopters.”
Academia, Industry, and Health Care
To bring Age Tech to scale, many of the day’s presenters emphasized that universities like USC must collaborate with startups, venture capital, and established healthcare players.
David Krane, CEO and managing partner of GV (formerly Google Ventures), emphasized the critical role that investment plays in bridging discovery and translation and the importance of technology companies to connect with and integrate knowledge from research and health care. He noted that over the past 15 years, GV has invested over a billion dollars per year in startup companies, with about half of that in some kind of healthcare.
“I think a stark reminder for all of us is that as we age, taking our resources, taking our networks, taking our dollars, and putting them behind age tech and improving health span is increasingly important,” he said. “And building cool, whizz-bang technology is not enough. If you’re going to be venture-backable in this space, you truly need a deep understanding of how your solution can scale within the existing healthcare system.”
Pictured left to right: Arnold Whitman, Amir Dan Rubin, Pinchas Cohen
Arnold Whitman, founder and managing partner of the Senior Living Transformation Company and member of the USC Leonard Davis School Board of Councilors, reinforced this message. An investor with more than 40 years of experience who recognized early on the need to invest in aging solutions, he emphasized the need for technology to reducing administrative burden and let care providers focus more on the “human element.”
“To me, the creation of value to me is both social and economic. There are very few businesses today where you actually create value in both ways,” he said. Using technology to take and integrate health care data, preferences, family information, and more can help to lessen administrative burden for care providers, who may spend 60% to 70% of their time doing administrative work, he added: “I think the more we do that, the more we enable that human element, that human connection, to be more effective and more efficient.”
Amir Dan Rubin, CEO and founding managing partner of Healthier Capital, brought a healthcare systems lens to the conversation. He expressed optimism about technology’s ability to automate workflows and streamline how people interact with health care providers, reducing patient frustration and provider workload. He also noted the potential for faster, more sophisticated analysis of electronic health records, which could help doctors identify and address health trends and risk factors for their patients.
“I’m extremely excited about what we can now do with the problem statements we have—that we’re aging and populations are aging faster around the world—and how we can leverage technology to address both the consumer side and the supply side,” he said.
Mark Humayun, USC University Professor of Ophthalmology, Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Biomedical Engineering and a pioneer in treating blindness, shared how his team’s latest research in stem cell-based implants has led to sight restoration in several patients.
“We’ve taken embryonic stem cells and developed them into a stem cell patch to patch up the area of central vision [on the retina] to enable people to see who are otherwise legally blind,” Humayun explained.
His work is an example of how university research powers further development by industry partners. He and colleagues founded a startup company, Regenerative Patch Technologies, to develop stem cell implant technologies for the treatment of retinal diseases using technology licensed from USC, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Advancements Rooted in Empathy
Among the most powerful voices at the symposium was Francesca Falzarano, USC Leonard Davis School assistant professor, whose research focuses on mental health, caregiving, and how technology can aid caregivers.
USC Leonard Davis School Assistant Professor Francesca Falzarano
“As a former family caregiver myself, I lived the impacts of aging,” Falzarano said. “It is not just impacting older adults. It has downstream effects on families, on how we care for our families, on what we’re able to do, and also on the health and long-term care systems.”
Her talk noted how technology can reduce caregiver stress, provide mental health support, and facilitate remote care. But she also offered a gentle critique.
“Tech developers often assume, ‘If you build it, they will come.’ But with older adults, that’s not always true,” Falzarano said. “We have to start with the needs of the older adults, asking them what their priorities are, what are their preferences, and how do we best utilize technology to serve their needs.”
Falzarano’s research prioritizes co-designing solutions with older adults and caregivers, ensuring their voices shape everything from user interfaces to deployment strategies.
“We can’t look at whether technologies are useful and applicable in a vacuum,” she said. “We need to understand the very diverse and multidimensional characteristics that are going to influence how older adults interact with and ultimately adopt technology.”
The human case for Age Tech is clear, and so is the economic one, said Debra Whitman, chief public policy officer for AARP, who shared the latest data from AARP’s annual tech survey. The average older person owns seven devices, from smart phones and tablets to smart TVs and fitness trackers, she said: “They’re spending $750 per person annually on tech.”
However, Whitman also noted that even though many are willing to spend their money on technology, AARP research shows that most older adults feel it’s not designed with them in mind. “It’s important to bring older people into the room as we talk about things,” she said. “The better we design with them, the better we design for them.”
Jacqueline Du Pont, USC Leonard Davis alumna and Board of Councilors member, said that tech solutions also have the potential to reduce costs and provide access to services on a more equitable basis. As CEO and founder of Senior Care Map, her aim is to provide a less stressful way for families to find senior housing options that fit their needs—while avoiding the referral fees charged by other companies—via an app similar to real estate websites such as Redfin.
“It’s super critical that we all understand we need transparency, we need accessibility, and we need to help people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, from people who can afford $20,000 a month to individuals on Medi-Cal,” she said.
A Future Built Together
As the symposium ended, Cohen thanked the event’s sponsors, including the Arnold M. Whitman Aging and Technology Initiative Fund, Sabra Health Care REIT, and Seniorverse. He reiterated that the event should serve as a call to action for all attendees to connect with collaborators and bring the ideas discussed during the symposium into reality.
The USC Leonard Davis School is investing in interdisciplinary research, expanding educational programs, and building partnerships throughout the university as well as industry partners in tech, health care, and senior living. This work will hopefully create a model that others will follow, continuing the Leonard Davis School’s 50-year history as a leading force in aging research, he said.
“The last five decades have been an incredible journey for USC, for the field of aging and for the nation towards the important goal of supporting healthy aging for everybody,” Cohen said. “Our goal is to create this environment where gerontologists, engineers, and other experts work together by integrating their basic values and their fundamental approaches to create solutions.”
Top: Arnold Whitman, Amir Dan Rubin, Pinchas Cohen, Jonathan Bandel, and David Krane (via Zoom) take part in a panel discussion on investment in aging and technology during the 2025 USC Age Tech Symposium.
