Project description
Building age-friendly homes
Europeans are living longer, but are our home environments adapted to our changing needs and preferences? Our home's ability to support us in realising our full personal and social potential is crucial for ensuring that extra years of life gained through increased longevity are spent in good health. However, a huge share of European building stock is not adapted to these new circumstances. The EU-funded Homes4Life project will define a certification scheme based on a user-centric approach and according to the specificities of each country. The project will ensure today’s homes support our changing needs and lifestyles as we move forward in life and allow us to stay active, participate in society and protect our health.
Objective
Age-friendly environments are one of the most effective approaches for responding to demographic ageing and increasing the Healthy Life Year indicator. However, there is still a huge building stock not adapted to the needs of older people. Even today, new buildings don´t yet properly address the need for creating smart living environments for ageing well.
Homes4Life addresses this challenge by contributing to the development of a common European framework for age friendly living environments, and defining the Homes4Life certification scheme to tackle end-users’ needs and requirements through a holistic and life-course approach integrating Construction and ICT solutions. The different socio-economic conditions (housing ownership, family structure, health system, etc) and building typologies among the EU member states will be analyzed in detail to provide the necessary flexibility to map the Homes4Life certification scheme to the specificities of each country with a user-centric approach. The scope of Homes4Life scheme will cover both new and existing buildings.
The strategy to define the certification scheme will be: i) analyzing the main difficulties and needs faced by older people to age at home, ii) identifying the physical and digital solutions that increase their quality of life and wellbeing, iii) assessing the availability, functionality and quality of service of the existing solutions on a specific home.
Homes4Life scheme aims to foster (public and private) investment making explicit the benefits for each stakeholder of transforming the building stock into a smart and integrated age friendly living environment.
Considering the need for social consensus for the development of this certification scheme the consortium will be supported by an expert board that includes 14 key players in aging at home domain, covering complementary disciplines (investment, standardization, e-health, building and design, public social services) and a Stakeholders Community.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
CSA - Coordination and support actionCoordinator
20009 DONOSTIA-SAN SEBASTIAN (GIPUZKOA)
Spain