Leveraging digital capabilities for sustainable aging support networks

t Patient empowerment and the diffusion of social network applications have the potential to facilitate the exchange of resources among members of community health information networks. The governance of such communities poses new challenges to healthcare policy makers that need new tools for leveraging social environmental factors and hence influence citizens’ health and quality of life. Drawing on sociological theories and on a cognitive model of dependence networks, we present a framework for investigating how digital capabilities can drive the emergence of sustainable aging support networks. The architecture of cognitive agents and of their environment is illustrated providing a proof of concept of the applicability of agent-based models to simulate the dynamic behavior of aging support networks. The model will be instantiated in two different scenarios in order to show how the properties of digital innovations and their diffusion dynamics, can bypass the limits of traditional healthcare models.