Alleviating late-life depression with smart technology: Evidence from China

Digital public policies are increasingly promoted as tools for supporting healthy aging, yet causal evidence on their mental-health consequences remains limited. This study examines the effect of China's Smart Health and Eldercare Pilot Policy on depressive symptoms among older adults. Using five waves of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study from 2011 to 2020, comprising 18,570 person-wave observations, we exploit the phased rollout of the policy as a quasi-natural experiment and estimate difference-in-differences models. The results show that the pilot policy reduced depressive-symptom scores by 0.304 points, with supporting evidence from parallel-trend tests, placebo analyses and propensity-score-matched difference-in-differences estimates. Mechanism analyses suggest that smart health and eldercare policies improve mental well-being by lowering the transaction costs of service access and social interaction. Specifically, digital technologies appear to expand social participation by reducing participation barriers and to improve service accessibility by increasing the effective regional supply of eldercare services through data-driven platforms. The protective effect is stronger in areas with poorer air quality and among married and non-retired older adults. These findings suggest that digital public policy can function as a capability-enhancing instrument for mental health in aging societies, particularly where environmental and service-access constraints are more pronounced.