Technology for Ageing in Place

Abstract

geing in Place, enabling older people to remain at home in their community and avoid institutional care for as long as possible, has been the dominant paradigm for successful aging over the last decade. On the face of it, ageing in place is praiseworthy as an ideal state of affairs. Putatively, it offers the best prospects for quality of life among the older population while contributing to cost reduction for institutional care and relief of the financial and resources burden upon the geriatric healthcare system. Moreover, the prospect of transposing the primary point-of-care to the older person’s home offers potentially substantial social and economic benefits to stakeholders, care recipients and providers alike. Nevertheless, various operational factors oppose the effective implementation of sustainable ageing-in-place infrastructures capable of supporting independent living by older people into advanced aged. To address these limitations, technological interventions, in particular information, computing, and com-munications technologies (ICT), are receiving increased recognition as the lynchpin to support successful ageing in place, through mitigating many of the complex practical challenges presented by independent living in the community. This article is an informal and synoptic review of the current state-of-the-art in ageing-in-place technologies, with an outlook to future possibilities with the advent of nascent technologies in the fields of robotics, smart sensors, neural interfaces, and artificial intelligence.