Successful aging is an experience governed by gender, culture, personality, and health-related factors. For some, successful aging simply means freedom from disability, while for others it is a more comprehensive assessment of life satisfaction. With an aging population, our society needs to evaluate what it means to ‘age successfully’ and how we – as healthcare providers or as families, friends, and neighbors – can help the elderly among us achieve and maintain valuable years near the end of their lives. Successful aging involves subjective criteria that are difficult to assess with objective measurements. But recently, new studies have been published that attempt to do just that. Measurements and assessments have included self-rated health, participation in activities of daily living,independence, depression, cognition, walking time and distance, number of days spent in bed, strength of extremities, recent hospitalizations, perceived resilience, personality traits, and ove...