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Influencing factor
Regulatory framework
and policies
Existing know-how
Financial incentives and
investments
Housing governance
Table 4 - Factors influencing the development of AFH
State of the art
Not clear at the moment. Regulations to be defined.
Very limited and
scarcely transferred.
Very limited.
The responsibilities are
not clear and there are
competing priorities.
Official guidance (handbooks, standards, and other specifications)
and dedicated organisations could help for awareness-raising and
diffusion of information and knowledge.
Grants and reductions (to support the switch from a standard to an agefriendly
environment) could push towards a greater retrofitting and
new AFH, whose value will be superior to standard dwellings.
Housing market and its needs should be thoroughly analyzed.
Future perspectives
as well as the health outcomes; promoting the sustainability
of public costs for long-term care (LTC), which is expected
to double by 2070; and stimulating innovation in the building
sector, creating knowledge and new job opportunities. In
this context, the EU is already active in the promotion of the
Smart Readiness Indicators to improve the energy efficiency
of buildings.
Given the trend to design AFH and retrofit the existing
buildings and the absence of currently widely accepted
standards in the design of these environments, the EU is promoting
the development of a European certification scheme
for age-friendly environments through the H2020 project
Homes4Life (http://www.homes4life.eu/, GA no. 826295).
The aim is to support health and well-being during ageing in
place, in an era when society is rapidly ageing and suitable
living environments that integrate both construction and
digital solutions are needed to respond to this challenge in a
holistic life-course approach. This certification scheme considers
not only new buildings but also existing structures,
in order to achieve a substantial and widespread presence of
AFH in 2040, thus addressing the challenge of ageing in place
for older people. AFH is influenced by many factors, as reported
in Table 4.
A certification scheme can stimulate investments in AFH,
providing comfort and security to stakeholders in both public
and private sectors. The information provided in this documentation
should be clear and easily comprehensible to both
inhabitants and stakeholders (co-owners of the certification itself),
besides evidencing the huge potentials of AFH.
A complete certification scheme should contain also detailed
information about the management (transmission
and access) of data gathered from the SLE, which should be
regulated according to ethical and legal international and
national laws and conventions. Suitable protective measures
against infiltration should be adopted and the data handling
should be standardised and properly regulated under
appropriate confidentiality agreements, in order to contribute
to the realization of a secure and standardised e-health
ecosystem.
64
Conclusive Remarks
Measurement processes that include instrumentation, sensors,
and AI strategy applied to a heterogeneous and complex dataset
can play a pivotal role in the development of effective AFH
models. It is beyond doubt that there is still plenty of room for
research that aims to answering big technical and engineering
challenges, such as sensors integrability and interoperability,
connectedness (both for data transmission and power supply),
system robustness, sensor miniaturization, durability (also in
view of their integration in buildings), and costs management.
Accurate AFH models can provide remote monitoring capabilities
and furnish objective elements for decision making,
offering a proper supportive background to the whole healthcare
system. The inclusion of such metrological aspects in the
certification schemes would raise the interest of a wider group
of stakeholders to promote the development of suitable strategies
to increase the dwellers' QoL, especially when they are
ageing people (frail or in particular social conditions, e.g., COVID-19
pandemic emergency). A properly designed SLE can
provide a reliable measurement of the inhabitants' well-being
(measured including physical, mental, and social spheres,
evaluated by merging the subject's feelings, perception, and
performed activities), and, at the same time, it is fundamental
to complement its quantification with the measurement
uncertainty. Many factors interact to define the uncertainty
value, and among the most critical we can surely count the
sensors accuracy, the AI algorithms performance, and the intra-/inter-subject
variabilities. With respect to the traditional
assessment of well-being, often performed through periodic
surveys, AI is able to provide an assessment from a wider
and more pervasive perspective, combining data from multiple
spheres (including personal, physical, social, and health
quantities) and fine-tuning the algorithms through the training
with big data.
In order to have a comprehensive view of what can be the
future of SLEs and AFH, it is necessary to consider the trends
in terms of socioeconomics, demography, technology, and environment,
so as to adopt adequate measures to reach more
sustainable societies in a 20-year period. An older population
IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine
September 2021
http://www.homes4life.eu/
Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine 24-6

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