Aged Care Insite Issue 108 | Aug-Sep 2018 | Page 26

practical living hazard, so if people are getting lost down hallways or forgetting to do daily activities, then we, with the Desert Rose, try to help them to still perform those daily activities as much as possible so they can be a bit more self-sufficient. So we try to remove all of those things that might be a hazard in the future. We have a strong point in all of the walls, throughout the entire house, for hand rails. So if their journey has ability issues, we can install hand rails throughout the home. So rather than have to heavily retrofit the home in the future, or have them move into a nursing home or something with high care, they can hopefully stay in the home for that little bit longer. Obviously, for most people, there will be a stage in their journey where higher care will be needed. We do have a second room which could be used for a carer, in certain instances. But eventually, if the dementia progresses too far, they will still need to go for those high-care facilities. We have, however, made the doorway into the master bedroom wide enough that you can fit a whole hospital bed in there, too, so if people are looking to have palliative care in their own home, it is achievable in the Desert Rose. What design principles did you have in mind when developing this house? We’ve worked a bit with Richard Fleming from Dementia Training Australia. He’s a professor at the University of Wollongong and has 10 design principles that he uses with his designing for large scale things, as opposed to individual residential homes. We’ve gone through and used quite a few of his principles. A lot of them are just good design, like reducing risks where they’re not needed, or reducing sound. And some of his design principles have more of a home in those large-scale things, whereas we don’t really have those issues in an individual dwelling. Also, we did a ‘day in the life’ activity, where we went through and pictured what we do throughout a day. Then we looked at some of the issues that people may have if they’re living with dementia, and how we could remove some of those issues so that they could still go about those daily activities. What feedback have you had from aged care providers? We’ve had some really good, positive feedback so far. I’ve gone to nursing homes across the Greater Illawarra for my research. My PhD is involved with going into 200 low-income elderly people’s homes across the Greater Illawarra, and that includes independent living. So we were able to learn a lot from not just how design was currently done with aged care providers, but from the occupants as well. Actually, with my research I had no intention of capturing stories from people, but it’s something that we’ve benefited from greatly, while going and visiting all these people’s homes every couple of years. So we tried to build a lot of the stuff that we learned from those people into fixing things in the Desert Rose. But we haven’t had a chance, I guess, to tour a lot of aged care providers now, since we built the house, but we’re excited to get them in and see what their opinions are. But more importantly, get the people in who would potentially be living in these homes in the future, and get their opinion as well. What features in the house would support occupants with mobility issues? There are lots of standards out there concerning wheelchairs, but not many for walkers. Some of the people I visited in my research weren’t in a wheelchair – they used a walker. And one instance where that doesn’t work is their hallways, which were designed to make it easy for wheelchairs to navigate. However, they were in a walker and were unable to take the walker down the hallway or move it around. One of the things we used during the design was the Microsoft HoloLens. It’s an augmented reality headset that allows you to walk through the house at a 1:1 scale, but it was in a virtual environment. So we have a walker with us in our design studio and we would take it out, put the goggles on, and we were able to walk through the house and see how the walker coped with all the furniture and turning cycles in the house. If it didn’t work, we’d have to go back to our models, change them on the computer and, five minutes later, load it back i