Towards Elderly-Friendly Home Environments in Egypt: Exploring Elderly Challenges, Needs, and Adaptive Strategies to Promote Aging in Place

Abstract

The aging population is rising globally, affecting the built environment, social welfare, and community services. Egypt is expected to witness significant demographic changes, leading to a rise in the elderly population. This increase drives designers, stakeholders, and policymakers to know elderly needs and interpret them into designs for environments, services, facilities, and products. This paper focuses on the home environments as the elderly tend to stay in their homes under the concept of "Aging in Place". Egyptian home environments are mostly built according to cost, laws, spaces, standards, and contractors' desires, without taking into consideration changing needs across the life span of people. Therefore, the main objective of this paper is to identify the essential needs of the elderly within their home environments. The human-centered design approach was adopted to explore the life experiences of a group of Elderly; by holding deep interviews to investigate their insights about aging in their homes, analyze the challenges they faced, and how can they adapt to these challenges within their home environments. The interviews were analyzed using a "thematic analysis" approach. The results revealed the main factors that present participants' insights about aging in place. Results also demonstrated the elderly's needs in their home environments and categorized them into three essential needs: safety, support, and wellbeing. Understanding the elderly needs can aid architects, designers, and stakeholders to create elderly-friendly home environments; that enable the Elderly to continue living in their current homes safely and independently and maintain or improve their quality of life.