Adaptive Heat Protection for Vulnerable People in Home Care Settings

Target group: Rising temperatures and periods of summer heat are a massive burden for the health of elderly and vulnerable people. People who are cared for at home are particularly affected. Strategies to adapt these people's living environments to climate change are crucial to prevent increases in heat-related deaths and an overload of the healthcare system. To support adaptation to climate change and rising summer temperatures for this particular target group, our proposal aims to develop and demonstrate solutions to achieve thermal comfort in 4 to 6 pilot projects within the existing building stock (including cultural heritage buildings) in each of app. 5 European countries involved in the consortium.  

Problem statement. Our project investigates which protective measures increase heat resilience of the homes of people in need of care, as they are generally not able to organise such measures themselves, and in many cases, neither are their families or mobile carers. Through appropriate organisational and construction processes, these people must be relieved of any effort (including obtaining funding, approvals, permits, and other requirements) for the implementation of minimally invasive adaptation measures – ideally, heat protective measures are put in place in their homes by novel service providers that cater to their needs following a one-stop-shop model. 

Project Activities and Goals. In our project, we plan to select typical care settings across differing regional, institutional, and climatic conditions in transdisciplinary research processes, thermally simulate them, and assess health-related risks in these home care settings. Adaptation measures (involving some of the following technologies/ approaches: Passive envelope optimization and retrofitting, Low-cost solar shading, Natural (nighttime) ventilation, Windcatchers, (Activation of) Thermal Mass, adaptive thermal comfort strategies, Biobased components, Adaptive user behavior, etc.) are tested, and services for their implementation are developed. Providing services to implement such heat-adaptation measures requires knowledge of building physics as well as health-related competencies and social skills. They constitute a considerable, albeit small-scale market – one which can only be addressed by integrated services of an innovative, not yet available kind. Various barriers hinder their market entry, and diverse framework conditions in different countries and regions require context-specific models. Our project aims to identify such barriers and develop context-specific solutions.