The World Health Organization (WHO) strives to assist and inspire cities to become more “age-friendly”, and the fundamentals are included in the Global Age-Friendly Cities Guide. An age-friendly city enables residents to grow older actively within their families, neighbourhoods and civil society, and o ers extensive opportunities for the participation of older people in the community. Over the decades, technology has become essential for contemporary and future societies, and even more imperative as the decades move on, given we are nearly in our third decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, technology is not explicitly considered in the 8-domain model by the WHO, which describes an age-friendly city. This paper discusses the gaps in the WHO’s age-friendly cities model in the field of technology and provides insights and recommendations for expansion of the model for application in the context of countries with a high human development index that wish to be fully age-friendly. This work is distinctive because of the proposed new age-friendly framework, and the work presented in this paper contributes to the fields of gerontology, geography urban and development, computer science, and gerontechnology. Original article at MDPI; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16193525 (This article belongs to the Special Issue Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment)
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Quality of life serves a reference against which you can measure the various domains of your own life or that of other individuals, and that can change over time. This definition of the World Health Organization encompasses many elements of daily living, including features of the individual and the environment around us, which can either be the social environment, the built environment, or other environmental aspects. This is one of the rationales for the special issue on “Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment”. This special issue is a joint project by the Centre of Expertise Health Innovation of the Hague University of Applied Sciences in The Netherlands. The main focus of this Special Issue is how optimising the interplay between people, the environment, and technology can enhance people’s quality of life. The focus of the contributions in this special issue is on the person or end‐user and his or her environment, both the physical, social, and digital environment, and on the interaction between (1) people, (2) health, care, and systems, and (3) technology. Recent advances in technology offer a wide range of solutions that support a healthy lifestyle, good quality of life, and effective and efficient healthcare processes, for a large number of end‐users, both patients/clients from minus 9 months until 100+ years of age, as well as practitioners/physicians. The design of new services and products is at the roots of serving the quality of life of people. Original article at MDPI; DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16245106 (Editorial of Special Issue with the same title: "Quality of Life: The Interplay between Human Behaviour, Technology and the Environment")
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Purpose – This paper aims to develop an understanding of the potential for application of facilities management concepts and principles in the context of the “zoo sector”. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is a conceptual one and begins with a narrative designed to provide sufficient background to understanding key issues relevant to the practice of facilities management in zoological and similar institutions, including the implications of conservational/scientific and display imperatives of zoological facilities for facilities management. We then consider how these issues can be worked through in the context of four broad dimensions of facilities management: strategies for the management of stakeholder behaviour (non-human animals, personnel and visitors); building and environmental design (including space usage); safety, security and health; and “miscellaneous” services. The paper concludes by providing a provisional framework for further research into facilities management in the zoo sector. Findings – As a conceptual paper, there are no empirical findings. Conceptually, the paper offers an initial and simple framework for interpreting the possible application of facilities management in zoological and related facilities. Originality/value – In a search of the two principal journals in the field of facilities management, nothing could be found of direct relevance to the management of facilities in zoological and similar organizations. This paper is thus a singular contribution to the field. Conceptually, the authors attribute neglect of the topic to the distinctive traditions in the study of facilities management, which, at the risk of caricature, emphasise either the pre-eminence of a building and building services approach to facilities management, or an approach which is almost exclusively focused on the “human” dimensions to the discipline.
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