Community-Based Digital Interventions for Promoting Healthy Ageing: A Scoping Review Protocol

This Scoping review aims to map and synthesize the existing evidence on community-based mobile health (mHealth) and digital interventions designed to promote healthy ageing among older adults. Population ageing is one of the most significant demographic changes globally and has increased demands on health systems, social services, and community support structures. Healthy ageing is defined as the process of developing and maintaining the functional ability that enables well-being in older age. It emphasizes maintaining intrinsic capacity, functional independence, cognitive health, psychological well-being, and social participation. Over the past decade, digital transformation has significantly changed healthcare delivery. mHealth and digital health technologies, including mobile applications, wearable sensors, telehealth platforms, remote patient monitoring systems, artificial intelligence-driven tools, and web-based interventions, have emerged as approaches to improve healthcare access and quality. Community-based implementation of these interventions supports ageing in place and reduces dependency on institutional care. This review seeks to address the current gap in evidence synthesis related specifically to community-based digital interventions aimed at promoting healthy ageing across multiple domains of functions and well-being. Existing reviews have commonly focused on single disease conditions, institutional settings, telemedicine alone, or high-income country contexts. Therefore, there is a need for structured mapping of intervention characteristics, health domains addressed, implementation strategies, and reported outcomes. The primary review question is: What evidence exists for community-based mHealth or digital interventions to promote healthy ageing among older adults? The review will also examine: 1. What types of digital or mHealth interventions are implemented in community settings? 2. Which domains of healthy ageing are targeted (physical, cognitive, mental, social, functional)? 3. What outcomes are reported? 4. What implementation strategies, facilitators, and barriers are described? 5. What research gaps exist? The review will follow the Joanna Briggs Institute methodological guidance for scoping reviews and will be reported according to the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Evidence will be identified through database and grey literature searches and findings will be analyzed descriptively and thematically. Expected outcomes include a comprehensive mapping of community-based digital interventions for healthy ageing, identification of barriers and facilitators to implementation, highlighting of best practices and scalable models, and identification of research gaps to inform future systematic reviews, primary research, and policy development