Session Overview |
Wednesday, June 05 |
08:45 |
Older people's dwellings becoming stronger control centers and more age-friendly places
* Stephen Golant, University of Florida, United States of America The future will witness the worldwide growth of older people with functional limitations or disabilities having difficulties traveling to their neighborhoods and other community destinations to satisfy their obligatory and discretionary everyday needs. This lecture argues that their dwelling environments deserve new scrutiny because they are becoming more salient and positively experienced places to live, better enabling their mobility-limited occupants to access their outside worlds. The catalyst is the emergence of gerontechnological innovations relying on digital and sensor technologies, offering these vulnerable older occupants a new category of dwelling connectivity solutions—constituting a paradigm shift—whereby goods, care, services, social supports, information, and leisure activities are delivered to their dwellings. Consequently, their dwellings have become "control centers" dynamically integrated with their outside worlds. Older people can cope more effectively with their declines and losses because their ability to live independently is less threatened by mobility limitations, travel challenges to destinations, and less age-friendly physical design features. By occupying more supportive and connected dwellings, they have overall more positive and salient residential mastery emotional experiences and feel more competent, empowered, and in control of their lives and environment. Planning or policy recommendations directed to the World Health Organization (WHO) and its age-friendly city/community agenda highlight how dwelling environments incorporating gerontechnological solutions are becoming more critical influences of "active aging." WHO should allocate more resources to dwelling interventions that increase the availability, awareness, and acceptability of these gerontechnological solutions. |