Design of Eco-Smart Homes, For Elderly Independent Living

Context. Living conditions for elderly people, including household services and healthcare provision in the home, have become a hot topic worldwide with the aging of the population and the rising societal costs for healthcare. The rapid increase of elderly populations putting a heavy strain on social welfare, healthcare providers, hospitals, nursing homes and service homes for elderly as well as on elderly people themselves and their caretakers, next of kin and social networks. Design of Eco-Smart Homes for the elderly is a practical and efficient approach that aims to address and deal with this situation. Intelligent housing offers support for independent living for elderly through the application and integration of advanced technologies in the home. The aim is to provide a full range of services to meet diverse and individual needs. Sustainability issues are addressed in design, development and building as well as in service provision. Objectives. In this study we investigate the conceptual modelling of the eco-smart home for elderly independent living in relation to the perceived needs and requests of the elderly population. Rather than focusing on the various technologies involved, however, we have basically ‘blackboxed’ the technical systems themselves and how they interact with each other. Our main focus is on exploring the needs of the elderly as a base for designing the different levels of the care service system in the eco-smart home. From these two points – integrated technological solutions for eco-smart housing, presented as a meta-system of blackboxed systems, and smart, adaptable care service levels for meeting the varying needs of the elderly – we aim to provide ideas and suggestions that can not only be of use for the Intelligent House Builder but also take into account the needs of users and the question of costs, which are important aspects of sustainable solutions. Methods. A literature review has been carried out, in which we have mainly focused on articles about technologies for smart homes. We have also interviewed three experienced employees in the welfare sector who work with the implementation of ICT solutions in healthcare and homecare. With their help and guidance, we gained a better understanding about the practical needs of the elderly, and the present situation in Swedish healthcare and homecare. Additionally, we have conducted interviews and a survey among elderly people about their opinions and requirements. After this, we have interviewed and discussed our conceptual model with a project leader in the area of innovations in applied health technology who has a number of years of experience of use-centered design of health technology for home care and who gave us valuable feedback on our conceptual model. Finally, we did evaluation workshops with questionnaires in Karlshamn and Ronneby. Results. We have designed an exemplar of an eco-smart home which includes integrated technologies to support and provide care service for the elderly. We have developed a comprehensive system-of-systems model and a care service-level model which we have mapped on to the system-of-systems model. The resulting conceptual model, which is a sketchy working construct intended to support integrative thinking around eco-smart homes for independent living, includes 5 main technology systems and 3 levels of customer service. The conceptual model was used in our interviews and survey to get feedback from elderly people as well as experts about the concept of service levels and integrated technologies in eco-smart homes. Conclusions. We conclude that the conceptual model we developed was supportive in our own work with trying to understand and address the complexity of designing an eco-smart home for independent living for the elderly, and that it also provided support for communication with elderly people about their care needs, requirements and expectations about technology-enhanced supportive living environments. Our interviews and survey among elderly, though limited in scope, indicate that elderly people living in Sweden are inclined to be interested in eco-smart home solutions and integrated design of technologies that can satisfy the primary needs of the elderly. The contribution of our thesis is to provide a comprehensive exemplar of a comfortable eco-smart environment for elderly independent living which combines integrated technologies with choices of desired level of service, thus bringing complex combinations of a multitude of different technological systems required for eco-smart homes closer to the actual everyday needs of the future users. From a Computer Science perspective, in the overlapping application domains of eco-smart homes and technical support for healthcare and homecare service provision, our main contribution is to bring to the foreground a focus on integrated services which are adaptable to different levels and combinations of user needs in the context of eco-smart elderly independent living.