Smart Home with Healthcare Technologies for Community-Dwelling Older Adults

Traditional smart home (SH) technology combined with new monitoring technologies designed to prevent falls and detect health status changes is the current direction for SH development. The combination of conventional SH technology with healthcare technology is likely to be an effective approach to preventing nursing home placement for frail older adults. Barriers to adopting or implementing monitoring technology include concerns about privacy and reluctance of older adults to accept the technology. Acceptance of the monitoring technology depends not only on the older persons’ health and functional status but also upon the perception of need and personal goals. Since great variability of health and disability conditions exists among community-dwelling older adults, their purposes of using SH with healthcare technologies may also be diverse depending on their levels of physical and cognitive functions and severity of illnesses. Older adults and their informal caregivers are likely to insist on choice of technologies suitable for their goals. Health care providers need to be familiar with the available technology. Home-based technologies allow older persons to adapt to changing physical and cognitive function and preserve living in a familiar environment within an established social network. Home-based technologies may be most effective, if they also promote healthy behaviour and lifestyles for continued community living. Focusing on the situation in the United States, this chapter includes: (1) a description of societal needs for the technology, (2) a summary of current SH status, (3) a review of older adults’ perceptions of SH, healthcare technologies and their effectiveness, (4) caregivers’ perspectives of the technology, and (5) defining the role of SH with health care technologies in the Model toward Optimal Management for Independent through Technological Adoption (Tomita et al., 2009). The model expands on behavioural medicine to promote healthy behaviours in community-dwelling older adults.