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How to Design Smart Homes for Older Persons: The Somatic Capability Assessment as an Answer to Current Design Challenges

Older persons have had decades to get to know their environment - and usually their home - through their own somatic experience. This somatic or "felt" experience enables them to assess their own capabilities when it comes to executing activities of daily living [1]. This is what we call "somatic capability assessment" or SCA in short, inspired by the theory of somaaesthetics [2]. The home offers the ideal background for an older person's - or any person's - SCA, as it feels familiar, stable, and private [3,4,5]. Smart home technology (SHT) while having the potential to support older persons to age in place [6], is nevertheless bound to disrupt these qualities of the former, non-smart home, and therefore also alter the SCA of an older person. This is because the monitoring sensors in the smart home add an external stream of data is now to the somatic, embodied experience of the person. When the assessment of the smart home disagrees with the SCA of the older resident, this can create serious challenges in daily living. However, putting the SCA at the center of designing monitoring capacities in a smart home for older persons may also be the solution of these challenges. In this paper, we first present how we developed the concept of SCA, then show why the home with its characteristics of familiarity, stability and privacy is important for the SCA. In a next step, we explain how the smart home potentially alters these perceived features of the former non-smart home, creating disruptive experiences for the resident, which may end in the older person rejecting the smart home altogether, thus undermining the whole justification of existence of the smart home for older persons. To counteract this possibility, we propose somatic design measures as well as a framework for the designing process, to adequately support and possibly enhance the SCA of older persons living in smart homes. This paper is part of a larger PhD-thesis which investigates the social and ethical boundaries of the use of smart home technologies for older persons, their professional caregivers, and their family members.