Abstract:    Population aging is a major challenge that drives the future for the next 40 years, which is just as important as the environmental challenges. In many Asian and European countries, the proportion of the older population relative to the total population has greatly increased and is still increasing, which will bring serious social problems. More experts and governments began to pay more attention to the role of technology innovation in responding to the aging society. Science, technology and innovation are widely perceived to provide the means for solving this "grand challenge" of demographic ageing. Innovations for older persons are usually referred to as gerontechnology, which is composed of two words: gerontology and technology. The literal meaning is composed of gerontology that conducts scientific research on aging and research, development and design of products, services and methods. Among them, gerontology is the scientific research on the elderly, including biological, psychological, social and medical aspects of aging. Technology includes research and development and design of new and improved technologies, products and services, covering chemistry and physics of knowledge in the fields of construction, machinery, engineering, electronics, information, communication, and so on.〖JP〗
〖JP3〗However, there exists a lack of research on the prediction of emerging gerontechnology for the current aging society, moreover, the analysis node focuses on the post-analysis of known emerging gerontechnology and the analysis object is limited to a single technical field. These limitations lead to it impossible to clearly define which of the emerging technologies applied to the aging society. Besides, the current research does not conduct an overall analysis of emerging technologies for the elderly. This is seriously inconsistent with the huge role played by the global population aging in the economic and social development process, and it also reflects that the current scholars′ research on the emerging technologies of elderly science and technology is insufficient and the research has not paid enough attention. In this context, we take the gerontechnology as the research object, and use the emerging technology prediction as a means to study the problem of emerging technology prediction for the aging society. In addition, most of the current technical prediction studies are based on single patent data and literature data, which have the limitations of time lag and greater risk of prediction results.
    In view of the above limitations, this paper combines the patent data and online network data, carries out patent semantic mining through text mining technology, draws patent map by combining spatial vector model and similarity calculation. Besides, this paper carries out the comparative analysis with network crawling expert opinion topic, so as to realize the prediction and evaluation of emerging technologies towards the aging society. To be specific, firstly, based on the Emerging Technologies to Support an Aging Population report released by the United States in 2019, we systematically sorted out and summarized the emerging technologies for the aging society, so as to determine the retrieval expression of patent technologies and collect patent data. Secondly, semantic mining and similarity algorithm are used to deeply explore patent themes and technology gaps in the whole field, so as to complete the preliminary identification of emerging technologies. Finally, a comparative analysis is made between the identification results and the more forward-looking expert network comment text. Through the comparative analysis method, the identification results are effectively evaluated and supplemented to reduce the risk of the predicted results.
    The comparative analysis results based on patent data semantic mining and embedded real-time network data show that, emerging technology trends supporting the aging society can be summarized as: big data and information collection and processing technology for the elderly, travel assistance and protection technology for the elderly, medical care technology for the elderly, smart home technology for the elderly, remote nursing assistance system and technology for the elderly, and cognitive management technology for the elderly. As can be seen from the results, the overall level of social cognition of products and services for the elderly is constantly improving. In addition, the integration of technologies for the elderly and high-tech is deepening, the technical content of old-age care products is constantly improving, and the development of intelligent and precise old-age care has begun to take shape. 
    In the current global situation where the total supply of elderly technology products and services is seriously insufficient, the structure is unreasonable, and the level is not high, how to capture the "silver economy" contains huge industrial development space, and has become an important driving force for the economic growth of various countries. An aging country should increase investment in emerging technologies for the elderly, fully tap its development potential, build a strategic core of the emerging gerontechnology system in advance, and provide technical support for the cultivation of the elderly technology industry.

Key words: aging society, emerging technology, technology forecast, semantic mining, social perception