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Homes4Life organises a series of webinars on age-friendly housing related topics

The partners of the Homes4Life project are glad to announce that a series of webinars will be organised throughout June and July 2020.

Their objective will be to present the work and studies carried out so far since the beginning of the project, to discuss their outcomes and perspectives, but also to tackle crucial questions related to the concept of age-friendly housing.

External experts will be invited as well and will share their visions. All webinars will be accessible to all and for free.

The 1st webinar will be specific to the Spanish context and will focus on the challenges and opportunities that represents having access to a home for the whole life (NB: This event will be held in Spanish only):

Una vivienda para toda la vida: reto y oportunidad

  • 11th June, 2020, 10:00-11:00
  • More information and registration here.

Other webinars – in English – will focus on:

  • the impact of the current COVID-19 crisis on age-friendly housing
  • the taxonomy developed during the Homes4Life project
  • the Certification Scheme on age-friendly housing proposed by Homes4life partners.

More information to come very soon !

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Pop-Up Ecosystem 5th Webinar – Social care and Home care in COVID Times

ECHAlliance is organising a webinar on Wednesday 13th May at 13:00 CET focused on Social Care & Home Care in COVID Times.

As the COVID-19 emergency has unfolded across the globe the impact on health and care systems has been clear to see. Less clear at the beginning but starkly obvious now is the impact on Social Care, Community Care and Home Care has been as if not more dramatic. Lack of equipment, isolation and remote monitoring and support have become crucial.

In the 5th of the series of Pop-Up Ecosystem, this webinar will feature again ECHAlliance ecosystems and members from around the globe to hear how they have tackled the crisis in care and most importantly how they have used digital health solutions to continue to provide that care that is so vital.

Registration here

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COVID impact on community health and social services across Europe

In the face of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis on community health and social services across Europe, the European Social Network (ESN)’s CEO Alfonso Lara Montero has co-authored a declaration supporting a necessary change in the long-term care model in Spain.

While the declaration was drafted against the difficulties faced by care professionals to support the most vulnerable in Spain, which has become one of the most affected countries, the analysis and the proposals made may be applicable to many other European countries.

The declaration states that this health crisis has revealed the inadequacy of care systems to cope with the vast numbers of already fragile and vulnerable people who have become sick as a consequence of the pandemic. The analysis of this situation should help us identify and assess potential risks to inform future actions in community care. This analysis may include ensuring continuity of care, coordination between services but also between health and social care systems, addressing who is responsible for what, and balancing values and care with people’s health and freedoms.

Among the various recommendations, the declaration fosters the design of environments for a meaningful life:

This involves new models of architectural design, organisational and management formulas that are as close as possible to living in one’s home. These models encourage living environments based on guaranteeing privacy, assuring personalised care, reducing staff turnover, and organising meaningful activities per people’s choice and in contact with the community.

The declaration concludes that the current situation can become an opportunity to achieve better care for the people who need it, progressing towards communities of care that commit to ensure that the participation of the most vulnerable becomes a priority.

Read the full declaration here

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Investing in later life : A toolkit for social services providing care for older people

The European Social Network (ESN) released a toolkit for social services providing care for older people. This toolkit is the result of the ESN work on ageing and care between 2014 and 2016, mainly through its working group on ageing and care, its crosscutting work on integrated social services, and the work on the social services workforce in the framework of its 2014-2017 strategy.

The objective of this toolkit is to provide recommendations and examples of innovative practice for senior professionals working in social services providing care for older people.

The report acknowledges that the shift of health and social care systems’ focus from reaction to prevention of ill health and early detection of risk factors is still ongoing. The benefits for this shift to prevent and delay ill health, thereby promoting and enabling older people to live a healthier, independent life for longer, and to reduce demand for expensive health and social care, have been widely documented. However, preventionis often seen through the medical lens, which can neglect important social, behavioural and environmental aspects of prevention.

Get the toolkit here.

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Homes4Life in a webinar on European funding for research and innovation

Homes4Life partner R2M Solution is organising a series of online webinars called ‘R2M Online Academy’.

On Tuesday 5th May 2020, Homes4Life was presented within a session focused on how to get involved in Horizon 2020 European collaborative research and innovation projects. The presentation detailed available funding and their mechanisms.

R2M Solution presenting Homes4Life in a webinar on European R&I

This webinar was organised in Italian but it might be replicated in English and other languages in the upcoming weeks.

The webinar has been recorded and is available to watch here.

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COVID-19 and virtual assistants in the context of smart homes

A recent paper by Laura Sheerman, Hannah R., Marston, Charles Musselwhite, and Deborah Morgan elaborates on the potential of Virtual Assistants (VAs) at times of pandemic.
Smart age-friendly ecosystem framework. This figure has been reproduced from Marston & van Hoof (2019) under a CC BY 4.0 license.
The paper refers to age-friendly environments and gives examples of how VAs and IoT can support independent living at home, including at times of COVID-19. The research highlights the risks of digital divide, accessibility for persons with speech impairments, and the issue of affordability.
Read the paper here.
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Dissemination and Communication Plan, activity and performance report

Homes4Life Deliverable D5.3 – Dissemination and Communication Plan, activity and performance report – is now available for download.

Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash

Executive Summary

The European project “Homes4Life” (http://www.homes4life.eu) started in December 2018 and will end in November 2020. Its main output will be the development of a new European Certification Scheme for age-friendly housing in Europe. The scheme will be based on a long-term vision of people’s needs and requirements based upon a holistic life-course approach and a new conceptual framework for age-friendly housing. It will help develop improved home environments that foster our independence, supporting us to remain active and healthy, and integrating construction and digital solutions where this is beneficial.

The purpose of this report is to present the Homes4Life Dissemination and Communication plan which identifies, organises and defines the management and promotion of the Homes4Life project objectives and results.

The key underpinning concept of the Homes4Life dissemination & communication (D&C) strategy is to target key external stakeholders based upon a three-stage process going from awareness to understanding and ultimately to a point where stakeholders are applying and exploiting the Homes4Life project key outcomes. In the first 12 months of the project the main focus of the dissemination actions is on stage 1 of the dissemination strategy (i.e. dissemination for awareness). During the next 8 months of the project it is anticipated that project partners continue with stage 1, but as concrete results emerge and milestones achieved, the dissemination strategy moves to stage 2 (i.e. dissemination for understanding). In the final two months of the project the focus will mainly be on those stakeholders who have the ability to implement the Homes4Life vision and certification, and the dissemination strategy moves thus to stage 3 (i.e. dissemination for action) which will make use of the practical material for exploitation/implementation (such as the Certification scheme promotional package)

The report also gives a summary of all D&C activities conducted over the first period of the project, i.e. from M1 to M12. All targets which were set at the beginning of the project when establishing the D&C plan have been met or exceeded, with the exception of the two KPIs related to Social Media (Twitter) and the CoI, which are slightly under at the time of writing this report. Specific efforts will be dedicated to these two criteria over the second period of the project. Project partners participated to 19 events, have been active on social media, and several articles about the project have already been published or are in progress to promote the project, its ambition, and support the exploitation of its upcoming results.

 

 

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Homes4Life Stakeholders Community of Interest

Homes4Life Deliverable D5.1 – Stakeholders Community of Interest – is now available for download.

Photo by Perry Grone on Unsplash

Executive Summary

The Homes4Life “Community of Interest” (CoI) is a network of key stakeholders interested in following the developments of the project and as such, supposedly interested in topics at the crossroads of ageing, housing and the age-friendliness of the built environments. The successful delivery and take-up of the project productions will depend on the capacity of project partners to engage with a representative range of stakeholders to be involved for the adoption of an age-friendly approach to housing. This holds particularly true for the design and adoption of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme, main output of the project, that will be the subject of a dedicated exploitation scheme targeting specific categories of stakeholders.

In that context, the Community of Interest will play a crucial role, by allowing for the consortium both to communicate on the project results and to obtain stakeholders’ inputs. These stakeholders range from public authorities to construction and industrial experts, technologists, providers of personal household services and representatives of inhabitants and older adults – be they owners or tenants. After 12 months of project, the Community of Interest count 121 individual members from more than 20 different countries (as of Nov. 26th, 2019) – mainly in Europe. A large majority of those members wishes to be informed about the project progress and achievements. More than half of them is willing to contribute to the development of the Certification Scheme; a same share is interested to test it.

Members of the Community of Interest have the possibility to contribute to the project and bring external expertise. This has been the case for instance during the first stakeholder workshop organised in Brussels on 11 June 20191. The Community of Interest will be maintained after the end of the project for instance by the entity that will exploit the Certification Scheme. Such a Community will be critical after the end of the project to foster the uptake of the Certification Scheme and to be able to identify and contact future demo cases or early buyers.

The Community of Interest has been initiated by communicating about Homes4Life among all the partners networks. It keeps growing thanks to a snowball effect, as more and more stakeholders hear about the project, e.g. during conferences and events attended by the partners. During the remaining 12 months of the project, the consortium will keep exchanging with the Community of Interest about the work carried out, the deliverables published, the events we organise, etc. It is expected to reach 750 members by November 2020.

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Homes4Life Functional brief

Homes4Life Deliverable D4.3 – Functional brief – is now available for download.

Photo by Felipe Furtado on Unsplash

Executive Summary

European countries have witnessed the rising issue of ageing population and thus the level of awareness globally grows. Our living environments have a key role in enabling older citizens to stay active and participate in society and to have a full role in the community.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 20171), housing is one of the three pillars composing age-friendly environments, along with accessible outdoor environments, transport and mobility. The impact that our homes can have on our health and wellbeing is also something well acknowledged.

Considering this context Homes4Life project has the objective to overcome those barriers by the development of a European certification scheme for age-friendly buildings and neighbourhoods ready for wide-spread adoption by a dedicated community of lead users.

This functional brief is the document that formalizes the need of the Homes4Life certification scheme around Age Friendly Housing, and it details the expected functionalities of the certification scheme as well as the constraints (technical, regulatory, …) it will have to face.

It also synthetizes the work done in T2.4(Working Taxonomy) and complements it with the results from the analysis conducted in Task 3.1(Analytical KPI Framework) and Task 3.2 (Analysis certification schemes). This document settles the basis for the development of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme in Work Package 4: Certification Scheme of Homes4Life model.

The functional brief includes the approach to the Certification Scheme, considering the benefits for the end-user, the context where it will be developed, and the limits found in the existing schemes.

It also establishes the scope and the principles of the future H4L certification scheme, detailing its future clients, the kind of building typologies that will be certified, the phases of the building where it will be evaluated, the indicators that will be analysed and finally a first approach to the assessment system and to the scoring method that will be used.

The process to follow to achieve the development of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme and the phasing of the process are sketched giving a first idea of the future definition of the Homes4Life Certification Scheme that will be totally defined, tested and developed during the next twelve months of the project.