Improving resilience of housing for low socio-economic older people: Let’s first look at the frailty level!

This research aims to gather information about existing house conditions of low socio-economic older people in South Australia including of those from culturally and linguistically diverse groups, in order to advance knowledge about resilient and affordable older people’s housing. The first stage includes focus group discussions, which so far have involved more than 40 older people and were conducted in English, Mandarin and Cantonese. The second stage involves collecting relevant data of 50 older occupants who participate in indoor environmental monitoring and occupant surveys, through interviews as well as frailty level assessments using validated tools. Environmental data loggers have been installed to record indoor and outdoor dry bulb temperatures, indoor globe temperatures, relative humidity, air velocity as well as indoor and outdoor CO2 concentration, every 15 minutes. Thermal image camera and blower door tests are used to detect sources of air leakage and calculate infiltration rates in selected homes. In the third stage, data collected will be analysed to develop improvement and new design strategies to improve wellbeing and reduce operational costs. This paper reports the preliminary results from the indoor environmental monitoring and occupant surveys. The results so far show significant differences between older participants identified to be frail and severely frail and those who are identified to be non-frail and vulnerable in terms of their thermal sensation, preference and satisfaction as well as the strategies they take to be comfortable. Lessons learned from these shall be considered in developing the relevant housing improvement strategies for the future.