AMCH 2027 Aging Well with Web and AI Technologies for Maintaining Good Mental and Cognitive Health

Populations are aging faster than care systems can adapt. Older adults increasingly find information, stay connected and receive care through the Web, and now through AI assistants and agents built on it.

AMCH 2027 revives the Workshop on Aging Well with Technology for Maintaining Good Mental and Cognitive Health, first held at WWW 2017 in Perth. We dedicate it to the memory of its co-founder, Professor Mark Chignell (1956–2025). This half-day, in-person workshop brings together Web, AI, HCI and health researchers to:

• share new results on Web- and AI-based assessment and promotion of mental and cognitive health,
• address the trust, safety, privacy and inclusion problems that AI companions and agents raise for older adults, and
• draft a shared research roadmap in structured, interactive sessions.

Why now

By 2030, one in six people will be aged 60 or over, and by 2050 about 80% of older people will live in low- and middle-income countries [8]. About 57 million people were living with dementia in 2021, and nearly 10 million new cases arise every year [9]. Loneliness and depression in later life are widespread and often go undetected. Many of the fastest-aging societies are in Asia, and Thailand is already an aged society. Care systems will not have enough human caregivers, so technology must help people stay mentally and cognitively healthy for longer [1].

Since 2017, what has changed is how this technology reaches people. The 2017 papers covered smart homes, sensors, ambient activities and serious games for dementia [4, 5, 7]. Today, older adults reach care through the Web itself: web-based cognitive games, voice assistants [2] and LLM-powered virtual companions that converse, remind and monitor [3]. Web interaction traces such as search queries can give early signals of neurodegenerative disease [6].

The same technologies bring new risks: persuasive or hallucinating agents, scams and misinformation aimed at older adults, opaque data collection, and interfaces that exclude people with low digital literacy or who speak low-resource languages. AMCH 2027 examines both the opportunities and the risks.

Who should take part

Researchers and practitioners in Web mining, user modeling, HCI and accessibility, NLP and conversational AI, health informatics and gerontechnology, as well as companies and policymakers working on aging and digital inclusion.

12 Oct 2026

Workshop decision announced by The Web Conference. The call for papers opens after this date.

4 Jan 2027

Paper submission deadline

1 Feb 2027

Notification to authors

16 Feb 2027

Camera-ready papers due

10–14 May 2027

The Web Conference 2027, Dublin. The workshop day will be announced.

We follow the conference's own deadlines. These dates are provisional until the workshop is accepted.

• Reconvene and broaden the community that formed at AMCH 2017. We link Web, AI, HCI, gerontology and clinical researchers with practitioners who build and deploy aging-well technologies.
• Share new results on Web- and AI-based methods for assessing and promoting mental health (for example loneliness and depression) and cognitive function (for example dementia and delirium) in later life.
• Address the risks of the generative-AI era for older adults: trust, safety, privacy, manipulation, ageism and digital exclusion.
• Produce a community roadmap of open problems, shared datasets and benchmarks, and evaluation protocols, including for non-English and low-resource languages. We will publish it on this website after the event.
• Honor Mark Chignell's legacy of human-centered, evidence-based technology for aging well. We plan to present a Mark Chignell Award for the best paper or demo.

We welcome work on, but not limited to:

• Web- and game-based cognitive assessment, and digital biomarkers from search, typing, speech and interaction logs
• LLM-based conversational assistants, virtual companions and voice assistants for mental well-being and social connection
• Agentic AI, smart homes and IoT for independent living, including fall, delirium and decline risk
• Serious games, exergames and ambient activities for cognitive and physical engagement, including dementia care
• Personalization and recommendation for older adults, caregivers and online caregiver communities
• Online safety: scams, misinformation and manipulation aimed at older adults
• Privacy, consent, data governance and the ethics of monitoring; ageism and bias in AI
• Accessibility, digital literacy and inclusion; multilingual and low-resource-language technology
• Datasets, benchmarks and evaluation methods; co-design with older adults; deployment studies, including in low- and middle-income settings

Fit with The Web Conference

Much of today's aging-well technology is delivered, mediated or measured through the Web. AMCH draws on the conference's core areas: user modeling and personalization (adaptive interfaces and companions), Web mining and content analysis (behavioral signals, scam and misinformation detection), the Social Web (loneliness and online communities), semantics and knowledge graphs (health knowledge distilled from the dementia literature), and responsible Web-for-good systems.

AMCH complements the main tracks. It brings in health, gerontology and HCI researchers who rarely submit to them, and it focuses on a population the Web often underserves. Dublin suits the workshop: Ireland hosts TILDA, the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing at Trinity College Dublin, and we plan to invite researchers from the local aging-research community.

More than half of the program is interactive. The schedule below is an approximate 3.5-hour plan, and each row's height follows its length. We will publish the final program, keynote and invited speakers after acceptance.

1. 0:00

   Welcome and tribute to Mark Chignell

   10 minutes, opening
2. 0:10

   Keynote: aging, the Web and AI

   A talk with questions, ideally from the host country's aging-research community.

   30 minutes, talk
3. 0:40

   Invited legacy talk: games and ambient technology for dementia

   15 minutes, talk
4. 0:55

   Lightning talks

   Every accepted paper gets a five-minute talk (8 to 10 talks) and a poster or demo.

   45 minutes, talks
5. 1:40

   Coffee break with poster and hands-on demo session

   30 minutes, interactive
6. 2:10

   Speed-dating rotations

   Small groups rotate around three challenge areas: assessment, promotion, and trust and safety.

   40 minutes, interactive
7. 2:50

   Debate: “Should AI companions care for our parents?”

   The panel includes at least one older adult or caregiver.

   30 minutes, interactive
8. 3:20

   Roadmap synthesis, Mark Chignell Award and close

   10 minutes, interactive

The call for papers opens after 12 October 2026. Submissions will use the ACM template through OpenReview, and we will link the submission page here. Until then, email us to hear when it opens.

Full papers, up to 8 pages

Archival. Published in the Web Conference Companion Proceedings.

Short papers, up to 4 pages

Archival. Published in the Web Conference Companion Proceedings.

Extended abstracts, 2 pages

Non-archival. Suitable for demos and previously published work.

Every submission receives at least two double-blind reviews, and organizers do not handle papers with which they have a conflict. We plan to invite extended versions of the best papers to a journal special issue, and will share details when they are confirmed.

Inclusion

We welcome non-archival work from the Global South and from practitioners. We ask authors to provide accessible slides and captioned media.

• Tossapon BoongoenProfessor, Aberystwyth University, UK
• Piyalitt Ittichaiwong, MDSiriraj Hospital, Thailand
• Susmita GhoshProfessor, Jadavpur University, India
• Sung-Bae ChoProfessor, Yonsei University, South Korea
• Sansiri TarnpradabLecturer, Department of Computer Engineering, KMUTT, Thailand
• Pornchai MongkolnamAssociate Professor, School of Information Technology, KMUTT, Thailand
• Muhammad Ali FauziAssistant Professor, Faculty of Computer Science, Brawijaya University, Indonesia
• Deborah FelsProfessor, Ted Rogers School of Information Technology Management, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada
• Irwin KingProfessor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

This is the list of members who have confirmed so far. We are inviting more and will add them here. We aim for a committee that spans regions, disciplines and career stages, with at least 40% women.

Mark Chignell and Jonathan Chan founded AMCH 2017 (Workshop 20) at the 26th International World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2017, in Perth, Australia, on 4 April 2017. Canada's AGE-WELL Network of Centres of Excellence inspired it. They proposed a full-day workshop, but it received a half-day afternoon slot because of the large number of workshop proposals.

The workshop received 12 submissions from North America, China and Southeast Asia, and accepted 8 papers, plus one invited paper from the University of Macau. Every paper received at least two reviews. The papers appear in the WWW 2017 Companion proceedings [1].

The original website was hosted by the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto and is no longer online. An archived copy is in the Internet Archive, and we have kept its content below.

Accepted and invited papers, AMCH 2017

• Jonathan Chan, Bethany Kon and Alex Lam: Evolution of Smart Homes for the Elderly
• Simon Fong, Shimin Hu, Wei Song, Kyungeun Cho, Raymond Wong and Sabah Mohammed: On Recognizing Abnormal Human Behaviours by Data Stream Mining with Misclassified Recalls
• Tiffany Tong, Jonathan Chan and Mark Chignell: Serious Games for Dementia
• Debajyoti Pal and Vajirasak Vanijja: A Video Quality Prediction Model for the Elderly
• Vajirasak Vanijja, Patricia Duangcham and Sachi Mizobuchi: Visual Attention Shifting Analysis: A Document Editing Scenario
• Andrea Wilkinson, Vishuda Charoenkitkarn, Judy O'Neill, Mark Chignell and Marc Kanik: Journeys to Engagement: Ambient Activity Technologies for People Living with Dementia
• Wutthipong Kongburan, Mark Chignell and Jonathan Chan: Distillation of Knowledge from the Research Literature on Alzheimer's Dementia
• Habeeba Kakudi, Chu Kiong Loo and Kitsuchart Pasupa: Risk Quantification of Metabolic Syndrome with Quantum Particle Swarm Optimization
• Invited: Simon Fong, Yan Zhuang, Shimin Hu, Wei Song, Lian-Sheng Liu and Luiz Abel Moutinho: Mobile Sensor Monitoring for TCM-oriented Healthcare Assessments

Organization, AMCH 2017

Workshop chairs: Mark Chignell (KMDI, University of Toronto, Canada) and Jonathan H. Chan (School of Information Technology, KMUTT, Thailand).
Advisory committee: Lili Liu (University of Alberta, Canada), Eleni Stroulia (University of Alberta, Canada), Thomas Hadjistavropoulos (University of Regina, Canada).
Program committee: Wutthipong Kongburan (KMUTT, Thailand), Sachi Mizobuchi (Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, Canada), Tiffany Tong (University of Toronto, Canada), Andrea Wilkinson (University of Toronto, Canada).

1. [1]Mark Chignell and Jonathan H. Chan. 2017. AMCH 2017 Chairs' Welcome. In Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on World Wide Web Companion (WWW '17 Companion), 1083–1085. doi:10.5555/3041021.3252703
2. [2]Alisha Pradhan, Amanda Lazar and Leah Findlater. 2020. Use of Intelligent Voice Assistants by Older Adults with Low Technology Use. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 27, 4, 1–27. doi:10.1145/3373759
3. [3]Prissadang Suta, Jonathan H. Chan and Pornchai Mongkolnam. 2025. Enhancing Elderly Well-Being Through AI-Based Virtual Companion Systems: A Cooperative Approach. In Cooperative Design, Visualization, and Engineering (CDVE), LNCS, 86–99. doi:10.1007/978-3-032-06952-8_10
4. [4]Tiffany Tong, Jonathan H. Chan and Mark Chignell. 2017. Serious Games for Dementia. In WWW '17 Companion.
5. [5]Tiffany Tong, Mark Chignell, Mary C. Tierney and Jacques Lee. 2016. A Serious Game for Clinical Assessment of Cognitive Status: Validation Study. JMIR Serious Games 4, 1, e7. doi:10.2196/games.5006
6. [6]Ryen W. White, P. Murali Doraiswamy and Eric Horvitz. 2018. Detecting Neurodegenerative Disorders from Web Search Signals. npj Digital Medicine 1, 8. doi:10.1038/s41746-018-0016-6
7. [7]Andrea Wilkinson, Vishuda Charoenkitkarn, Judy O'Neill, Mark Chignell and Marc Kanik. 2017. Journeys to Engagement: Ambient Activity Technologies for People Living with Dementia. In WWW '17 Companion.
8. [8]World Health Organization. 2024. Ageing and health. Fact sheet.
9. [9]World Health Organization. 2025. Dementia. Fact sheet.

Write to jonathan@sit.kmutt.ac.th or debajyoti.pal@sit.kmutt.ac.th. Use the subject line “AMCH 2027” so we find your message quickly.