Capacity Planning for Ambient Assisted Living

Abstract

Housing services and utilities represent the highest share of the EU Silver Economy. EU Member States are ageing. The demand for specialised housing for older adults and ambient assisted living technologies is expected to triple in the next 40 years. The ageing population is driving the expenditures of health care (HC) and long-term care (LTC) provision without visible improvement in the quality of life of older adults. Ambient assisted living technologies and ambient intelligence can enable residents to live longer in their own homes and in specialised housing in the community while mitigating the increasing public expenditures for health care and long-term care. We present the results of the survey, how older adults in Slovenia perceive the ambient assisted living housing, where large share of older adults, who are already included in municipality home care programs, want to live after a severe decline in their functional capacities. These results enable us to forecast the dynamics of the expected demand for specialised housing for older adults and the expected directions of the development of specialised housing and the supply networks. We present the multiple decrement model to forecast the dynamics of this demand when developing the silver economy. This structure of demand, we show, depends on the demographic and the income of the older adults. Therefore, it influences the probabilities of transitions in a multiple decrement model for forecasting the dynamics of development of specialised housing with embedded AAL technologies for older adults.