Situational Design for Equitable Home Safety: Bio-Psycho-Social Approach Based on Data-Driven Situational Risk Assessment

The technology for enabling more inclusive and equitable home safety by considering diverse living situations is strongly needed. This study proposes a novel assistive technology designed to enhance injury prevention at home, grounded in situational risk and a bio-psycho-social model. Unlike the conventional information dissemination system such as hazard prediction training systems, the proposed system allows us to quantitatively assess risks based on a large amount of accidental situation data in a data-driven way. It also deals with a function for lowering psychological barriers to taking preventive measures at actual home environments. To this end, the proposed method comprises the following three primary functions on a virtual reality system: 1) presenting accident data within similar living conditions based on situational risk at the biological level; 2) identifying psychological barriers to adopting preventive measures at the psychological level; and 3) providing information for accessing social support at the social level. The system was implemented using accident data from the Tokyo Fire Department (429,848 cases) and survey data from 600 caregivers regarding their reasons for not implementing prevention measures. In addition, a questionnaire survey of 11 practitioners, including doctors, nurses, and nursery staff, was conducted to evaluate the system’s core functionalities.