Giving life to nursing home care by creating smart communal space near them
Sahar Aliakbar
Giving life to nursing home care by creating smart communal space near them.
Rel. Alfredo Mela, Mauro Berta. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Architettura Costruzione Città, 2017
Abstract
INTRODUCTION
The aim of this project is creating smart intergenerational spaces near the nursing home care with focus on identifying problems of the elderly, resolving them and providing recreation, social, cultural services to them. This increases the comfort and happiness between elderly and as a result, facilitates and increases the functionality of urban areas for senior people that finally will help to prevent isolation, depression, Alzheimer and other aged-related diseases. One solution for this is though producing smart places in specific city nodes considering standards and ergonomic of aged people. Other advantages of this approach is:
A) Increasing social interaction between the elderly and youth to prevent isolation and mental diseases (Figure 1)
B) Taking advantage of aged manpower in specific light works suitable to them in order to decrease the burden of elderly care on society and help the elderly to feel capable (Figure 2)
C) Serving the elderly by elderly for disable or low capable ones (Figure 3).
The elderly population is growing that will cause aging global crisis in the near future. Aging has become a truly global challenge, and must therefore be given high priority on the global policy agenda. A gray dawn fast approaches. It is time to take an unflinching look at the shape of things to come. The elderly need extensive care, and the youth power that can be used on other task of society have to be spent on taking care of them; this has many cost in terms of money and Ome for their families and government.
People have many problems in old ages, like: feeling burden, ineffectual and reduce life expectancy due to isolation from society. Most of the effective interventions (for preventing social isolation and loneliness among older people) are group activities with an educational or support input. On the other hand, ineffective interventions provided one to one social support, advice and information, or health-needs assessment. It is suggested that educational and social activity group interventions that target specific groups can alleviate social isolation and loneliness among older people. They despite willingness to participate in social interaction and the use of urban spaces are suffering from lack of urban space with proper facilities for independent life, using their experience and connect with other people, etc. Researches show that 50% of the reducOon of physical activities in people of 30-70 years old is due to lack of proper environmental factors. In other words, the elderly like to have responsibilities and create social relationship to prove their capabilities. More specifically, these situations are more severe for aged people living in nursing home-care units, because they are separated from their family and are more isolated from society. But are urban spaces taking in to account the needs of the elderly?
Do urban spaces provide the necessary facilities for this class of society?
To this purpose, this project focuses on several sites in Vaud near nursing home-care units, and improves the urban spaces to the benefit of the elderly by using new and smart technologies, and based on design-standards and ergonomics related to aged people. Moreover, being close by home-care units provides more and easier availability to the old people living there and in the surrounding residential areas. I am going to propose intergenerational complexes that take advantage of smart materials and elements (floor, wall, facade, etc.), equipment (robots, walker, bracelet, etc.) and the elderly manpower to carry out tasks such as management of part of the complex, child care, elderly care, education of youth, cooking, cleaning, technical activities, light agriculture, etc. This will help the aged people improve society by doing light task in addition to have social relationships that prevent the social isolation and reduce exploiting the youth power, as mentioned above.
This project proposes two types of outdoors (beautiful landscape, sport activities, social gathering, shops, bank, post office, etc.) and indoor spaces (kindergarten, educational spaces, health care complex, etc.) dedicated to activities as:
1. group activities
2. education
3. services.
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