Digital and Social Participation in Age-Friendly Smart City Environments: Evidence from the Extended Interconnected Public Spaces (EIPS) Framework

Population aging and digital transformation are reshaping opportunities for participation, autonomy, and inclusion in contemporary cities. While smart-city initiatives increasingly promote digital technologies as tools for healthy aging, limited evidence exists on how digital readiness, meaningful participation, and quality of life interact within real-world hybrid urban environments. This study examines these relationships through the Extended Interconnected Public Spaces (EIPS) framework, a human-centered socio-technical approach that connects geographically distributed communities through digitally supported shared activities. We conducted a multi-phase mixed-methods study involving 63 adults aged 50–94 years across rural, urban, community, and institutional settings. Data were collected through digital-readiness and artificial intelligence questionnaires, activity-specific surveys, standardized psychometric instruments, interviews, and focus groups, with analytical sample sizes varying across study components. Descriptive quantitative trends suggested increases in self-assessed digital competence, while qualitative findings indicated perceived gains in confidence, learning, social connection, participation, and willingness to engage with artificial intelligence among intervention participants. Shared virtual experiences generated high levels of emotional connection, intercultural learning, motivation, and perceived presence across distance. Although standardized measures of psychosocial well-being and quality of life did not show statistically significant differential effects, qualitative and activity-specific findings highlighted perceived gains in confidence, autonomy, learning, social inclusion, and access to meaningful opportunities. These findings suggest that the primary contribution of hybrid smart-city environments may not be immediate improvements in broad well-being indicators but the creation of enabling conditions that support digital inclusion, autonomy, social participation, learning, and community capacity. EIPS is proposed as a human-centered framework for age-friendly smart cities that links digital access, capability development, participation, distributed community connection, and community strengthening within interconnected physical-digital environments.