Local authorities and healthcare professionals are being invited to take part in a series of pilot projects on developing housing for healthy ageing.
The Connected Places Catapult (CPC) is planning to back the pilots, which will also involve technology companies and housing providers, in an effort to refine ideas on how to enable older people to carry on living at home.
It has issued a challenge based open call for solutions with the potential to scale up for wide use, along with proposals for the next steps and how to build business cases for a wider roll out.
“We are agnostic about the route to market at this stage: there may be viable business to consumer propositions, but we are also interested in exploring models which involve a range of stakeholders from local NHS trusts to large corporates through to smaller community organisations,” the CPC said.
It added that, as body part funded by government and with strong connections to academia, it is well placed to help overcome the system level challenges to the effort.
This follows work on identifying the distribution of older people around the country with the creation of data maps.
Need for understanding
“To adapt now, and into the future, we need to understand both the challenges and implications of ageing as well as the opportunities,” CPC said. “This will help policy makers create better policies for housing, transport, technological connectivity, education, employment, health and social care and the welfare system.”
It also said that in the UK 18.5% of the population was aged 65 or over in 2019, an increase of more than a fifth from 10 years previously, and the trend is set to continue.
The organisation is a government backed body that fosters the development of digital solutions for local government and transport.
Image: Sheltered housing, Essington, geograph.org.uk, Creative Common Attribution Share Alike 2.0 Generic through Wikimedia
