Healthcare at Home. Spatial Solutions and Integrated Enabling Technologies for Aging in Place

Within the past decade, advances in medical technology, the desires and complex care needs of an ageing population, and innovative care delivery models have initiated a shift from providing care in hospitals to outpatient settings. And more recently, the acceleration and amplification of these factors is pushing healthcare options even further from the traditional inpatient and outpatient settings towards acute and subacute care in the home. This has led the medical community to look toward providing more tools and methods of care that patients can access safely right from home and the designers to think as the homes of the future will be flexible to support both an array of devices to provide a healthcare delivery and the humanization and personalization of the domestic space. In light of the changing housing demand aimed at a predominantly elderly population, and awareness of the strong impact that aging of the population has on care, on the costs of health services, on the lives of the elderly and on the maintenance of their conditions of independence, and the most recent investments of the National Plan for Resilience and Recovery to relocate care from hospitals to local structures and even to homes themselves, the paper investigates the issue of the adaptability of the home to the needs of elderly people and to the different care conditions to encourage aging in place.