“Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model

Marston, Hannah R.; van Hoof, Joost

doi:10.3390/ijerph16193525

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“Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model

Hannah R. Marston

^1,*

and

Joost van Hoof

^2,3

Health & Wellbeing Priority Research Area, School of Health, Wellbeing & Social Care, The Open University, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire MK7 6HH, UK

Faculty of Social Work & Education, The Hague University of Applied Sciences, Johanna Westerdijkplein 75, 2521 EN Den Haag, The Netherlands

Department of Spatial Economy, Faculty of Environmental Engineering and Geodesy, Wrocław University of Environmental and Life Sciences, ul. Grunwaldzka 55, 50-357 Wrocław, Poland

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16(19), 3525; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525

Received: 23 August 2019 / Revised: 12 September 2019 / Accepted: 16 September 2019 / Published: 20 September 2019

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment)

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Abstract

The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more “age-friendly”, and the fundamentals are included in the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and offers extensive opportunities for the participation of older people in the community. Over the decades, technology has become essential for contemporary and future societies, and even more imperative as the decades move on, given we are nearly in our third decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, technology is not explicitly considered in the 8-domain model by the WHO, which describes an age-friendly city. This paper discusses the gaps in the WHO’s age-friendly cities model in the field of technology and provides insights and recommendations for expansion of the model for application in the context of countries with a high human development index that wish to be fully age-friendly. This work is distinctive because of the proposed new age-friendly framework, and the work presented in this paper contributes to the fields of gerontology, geography urban and development, computer science, and gerontechnology. View Full-Text

Keywords: older adults; ageing; technology; digital; e-health; urban planning; digital ecosystem; robots; gerontechnology; ageing in place; scenario planning

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Marston, H.R.; van Hoof, J. “Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2019, 16, 3525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525

AMA Style

Marston HR, van Hoof J. “Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2019; 16(19):3525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525

Chicago/Turabian Style

Marston, Hannah R., and Joost van Hoof. 2019. "“Who Doesn’t Think about Technology When Designing Urban Environments for Older People?” A Case Study Approach to a Proposed Extension of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities Model" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 16, no. 19: 3525. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525

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