The new smart home technology that’s helping seniors age in place

About one in four Americans are at least 60 years old, and this group now outnumbers children in 11 states and in nearly half of all U.S. counties. Technological advancements are needed to serve a senior population that overwhelming prefers to age in place.

Whether a client needs technology for life-saving reasons or mere convenience, the proceeds from a reverse mortgage can help borrowers who wish to retrofit their current home or purchase a new one.

HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) spoke with Dr. Jing Wang, the dean of the Florida State University College of Nursing. Along with her workforce development efforts in nursing, her research efforts are focused on the use of mobile and connected technologies to improve patient outcomes.

Much of her work is centered on senior populations in rural and underserved areas. She’s also working to connect a variety of fields — including the reverse mortgage industry — to address the gap in technology for home health care needs.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Neil Pierson: Surveys have shown that the vast majority of seniors want to age in place. What are your thoughts on how we’re progressing as a country to help people achieve that goal?

Jing Wang: That number never goes down. It always goes up. Who doesn’t want to stay in their own home and age in their own home? But you’ve seen the markets where there are these traditional retirement homes, like assisted living and independent living. Then you have 55-plus communities. Maybe in urban areas, there are more choices for people with lower socioeconomic status.

I think, overall, the U.S. is really underdeveloped to reach the senior care needs for aging in place, which is a spectrum. If you’re talking about your age 55 group and thinking about aging in place, it’s different from when you are age 100 and thinking about aging in place. The needs range from wellness topics to serious in-home health care. And I would say the wellness side is better prepared in the U.S., versus senior care for the older adults whose needs require more intensive medical care — for example, home-based dialysis care. Then you are talking about how well this home is ready for this intensive medical care happening within the home.

I think that space is much less prepared. A lot of the current retirement homes, of course, take consideration of wellness and some of the features they can put in are easy ones, like fall prevention. And there are aging-in-place technologists and aging-in-place designers that are fitting into individual needs to design a bar here, a handle here, for the stairs, for your bathroom.

NP: A follow-up question to that is, are there other countries that might serve as a good model for how this can be done better?

JW: Every country is different. For example, Japan is sort of the country that is most known for elder care, but their home is a little tiny room, versus our home for a senior here, it can be a house that sometimes has two floors.

Countries like Japan, South Korea or even some of the European countries are growing much faster in the smart-home market. And there are numbers projecting that the smart-home market is going to grow fast. That market is also driving smart home for health care or smart home for the senior aging in place. You have people who are aging that are actually dependent on technologies, and when they become that older group, they will want to have all these smart technologies to be around them, because they’re used to it and they want to take advantage of it in their home.

NP: How are homebuilders and developers looking to address these challenges in new construction?

JW: You will see very limited adoption of smart home features in new builds. But we worked with builders very closely, actually, in our initiative — the FSU, Margaritaville Holdings and Samsung partnership. We partnered with one of the largest 55-plus communities. There’s a long waiting list for those homes and there’s a big master plan. We work with the builder and the economic development company for that area.

For our pilot model home, there are a lot of pragmatic concerns that they’re very interested in — that’s why they want to partner with us. But they need to pay attention to this as more of a retrofit feature for seniors to buy it after they buy the home. They’re hesitant to put more expensive smart-home technologies in place before the residents actually move in. But if it’s part of a contract for a new home, you kind of have to have that.

I’m just learning more and more from these communities about what’s the best way to really put these technologies in place. From a homebuilding perspective, there are parts like lighting, where you put plugs to empower internet or electrical backup.

Samsung has partnered with us and other retirement communities to have these model homes. When you buy a new home, you go to a model home and you can choose which floor plan you like, which color you like. I think you will see more of these showrooms that will put the current smart home technologies in the places where people are building new homes or where people want to retrofit their home. You’ll see that trending up, but it’s not the mainstream happening in the current new builds.

NP: You touched on partnerships, but when it comes to the people who can finance these types of projects, who do you need help from to get the money flowing?

JW: We actually just founded a Global Alliance for Smart Health Homes, because we recognize the professionals that are involved in this field are spread everywhere. We’re looking at this as the more professionals who are specialized in providing the care, the better. And when I say that, it’s beyond just nursing care or medical care — it can be the mortgage professionals who are trying to support them in the financing to find a place to live.

Our whole purpose of creating this global alliance is to help us bring all the people who are in this space together so that we can have concentrated efforts. Right now, there are thousands of different pockets of people that are doing similar things, but it’s not moving the field forward fast. These seniors need holistic support.

I want to see more professionals from different sectors come together to create some standards and make it simple for consumers to understand, ‘OK, here are my options.’ That’s kind of my grand goal in how I would like to see the field move forward together.