As regards of employment creation, the services for the elderly are an expending market area. But, this is only one aspect of the solution, because the apparatuses, equipment and systems likely to help the elderly people constitute also a source of employment of high added value for industrial production. This field of study is analyzed using the APA (Automatic Patent Analysis).
The world patent database from the EPO (the European Patent Office), covers more than 90 countries and provides access to approximately 80 million notices. This living technological encyclopedia can be exploited via bibliometric analysis to provide an accurate view of the trend of the technological environment related to the elderly people. After having determined the most exactly as possible the elements of querying the base, the search result was downloaded and analyzed. Various tendencies were determined : technological change and chronology of patent deposits, applicants, orientations of the R&D by country, etc. This leads to knowledge of the environment of this field and among other current developments, potential markets and the main actors as well as the possible entrants. These results are useful because they allow companies having competencies close to that used in the patents selected, to consider a diversification in this field. (Kister & Dou, 2011). Then a query on a database of scientific publications will be able to supplement the patent information to analyze the world of the scientific research in the field and to initiate possible PPP (Public and Private Partnerships) between industry, research and policy makers.