HabitatCare
Neuroarchitecture and Active Aging
How can we design spaces that promote better quality of life in elderly populations?
Population aging and the resulting increase in demand for care services pose urgent challenges (WHO, 2024). Under this premise, the concept of active and healthy aging emerges, understood as the process of optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security with the aim of improving people's quality of life as they age. This approach seeks to foster and maintain the functional capacity that enables well-being in old age.
In this context, the physical spaces where older people carry out their daily lives take on a decisive role. Numerous studies in gerontology and environmental psychology agree in pointing out that the configuration of the environment directly influences the mood, cognitive functioning, and quality of life of those who inhabit these spaces. However, this evidence has had little practical translation into the processes of designing, equipping, and managing spaces, where homogeneous standards that are poorly adapted to the diversity of real needs still persist.
The HabitatCare: Neuroarchitecture and Active Aging project arises to respond to this need for a profound transformation in the approach to designing care spaces. Through an interdisciplinary approach based on evidence-based design, centered on people and the use of technologies supported by Artificial Intelligence, it proposes to investigate how the physical and environmental attributes of space (such as lighting, sound, air quality, biophilia, or the layout and design of furniture) influence the overall well-being and quality of care received by older people. This research was carried out in a real pilot case: a residential unit at the Residencial Palau care center, where a spatial reconfiguration and interior re-equipment intervention will be undertaken together with two manufacturers from the habitat sector (CitySens and TMM), in collaboration with AHEAD Barcelona, a studio specialized in architecture for health.
The objective of HabitatCare is the following:
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To determine whether a neuroarchitectural renovation in a nursing home leaves a measurable and favorable imprint on the EEG activity of residents, comparing two sessions: one prior to the renovation (pre-renovation) and another afterward (post-renovation), on the same participants and with the same protocol.
