Intelligent Homes – In the context of an ageing population, increased financial austerity and a major housing crisis, how do we empower and enable our elderly, infirm and disabled people to stay in their own homes? How can we use robotics to help us, if at all? How do we pay for the high cost of falls and other difficulties to beset our elderly, infirm and disabled people?
We’re using Crowd Wise to consider these and other issues at our event on Intelligent Homes as part of our RAEng Inegnious project. It’ll be for one afternoon and probably about 3 hours during w/c Monday 14th July.
Although in the early planning stages, this new debating style helps us consider, analyse and appreciate the underlying issues.
In any debate it is important to consider the options and our event on Intelligent Homes is no exception. Respected experts had divergent views which are still unresolved so we’d like your opinions on the part Intelligent Homes can play in helping elderly, infirm and disabled people stay in their homes rather than going into residential care.
Options which may contribute to this debate are just options rather than opinions or beliefs and some of the issues might be:
- People are better with human support until they need to go into a home;
- Autonomous robotics fills the gap where human support is unavailable;
- Intelligent homes are unworkable as old people just wont use it [perhaps because they are technologically ];
- The status quo is unacceptable and we want people to stay in their own home because residential care is far too expensive;
- We need to redesign the retirement homes which is a cheaper option than the cost of retrofitting homes with the necessary technology;
- It’s unfair to keep people in homes which are larger than their needs because of the housing shortage;
- It’s unethical to expect people who own their own home to move into residential care just because of a housing shortage and/or the costs of retrofitting a large house rather than moving to a custom built house.
The puzzle is to merge duplications so that we end up with 5 options all of which must be framed in a positive way.
Action for Involvement 