A new blueprint for smart homes could help people in rural Scotland live healthier lives, whilst tackling fuel poverty and cutting carbon emissions.
Developed by the Digital Health & Care Innovation Centre (DHI), ENVISION: The Digital Blueprint for a Smart Home of the Future’ offers a practical, costed response to three of the UK’s most pressing and interconnected challenges.
Those are a health and care system under historic strain, a housing stock responsible for nearly a fifth of the country’s carbon emissions, and a population ageing faster than the infrastructure built to support it.
The blueprint was delivered as part of the £5 million Rural Centre of Excellence for Digital Health & Care Innovation, funded by the UK Government as part of the Moray Growth Deal.
It supports a programme to advance digital health, social care innovation, and rural housing development, and partners with built environment specialists BE-ST, Moray Council, architecture practice Architype, strategic built environment and technology partner Evolve Capex, and socio-political entrepreneurs The Alternative UK.
Margaret Whoriskey, head of innovation for care & wellbeing at DHI, said: “There is a real opportunity here to move beyond minimum standards and design homes that actively support people to live well as their health and care needs change.
“ENVISION reframes the home as something more fundamental, not just shelter, but preventative infrastructure. The technology to make that shift is available now, it is affordable, and the financial case for deploying it is strong, particularly for social landlords managing assets over the long term.”
The blueprint identifies how low-cost technology can be implemented at the build stage for new homes, or retrofitted into existing ones. It outlines ten predictive use cases where sensors and edge computing could be deployed across a range of common scenarios including damp and mould risk detection to early signs of cognitive drift, monitoring air quality, temperature, movement, humidity and sleep patterns.
Although designed to be replicable across Scotland and beyond, the blueprint is ‘firmly rooted’ in Moray, and takes accounts of conditions that affect rural localities such as higher energy costs, older housing stock harder to treat, patchy digital connectivity, and reduced access to health and care services.
The document has already attracted a group of early adopters committed to testing and implementing its recommendations, including Moray Council, BE-ST, Hanover, Bield, Grampian Housing Association, Capability Scotland and The Retail Trust. Private home builders considering innovation pilots through the Moray Growth Deal housing mix programme are also among those the blueprint is designed to serve.
Councillor Marc Macrae, chair of the economic development and infrastructure committee and Moray Growth Deal lead, said: “It is great to see Moray as an innovator in rural housing and digital health. Through the Moray Growth Deal, we can support solutions that respond to challenges faced in our communities such as fuel poverty and ageing housing stock.
“The ENVISION blueprint shows that homes, both new and old, can play an important role in improving health and wellbeing while also reducing energy costs and emissions.”