Stephen M. Golant

Global increases in longevity have led to a rapidly growing population of older adults entering advanced old age, facing increased risks of chronic illness, mobility limitations, sensory impairments, cognitive decline, poor emotional health, and social losses. These vulnerabilities make it more difficult for them to maintain independent living arrangements and to age optimally in their current homes, neighborhoods, and communities. Routine tasks like climbing stairs, reaching high shelves, or avoiding slippery floors become unsafe. Older people struggle to reach inhospitable community destinations to meet their obligatory and discretionary needs. As their “activity spaces” shrink to the home's confines, they experience new health stressors that further complicate age-related declines. Research and intervention strategies have emphasized making homes age-ready and reducing barriers to community access. However, rapid advances in digital technologies necessitate a reevaluation of how older adults interact with their surroundings. Homes can function as digital environments, equipped with internet-connected devices and AI-powered software. Interior sensors can detect dangerous temperatures, and wearables can monitor vital signs and medications. Motion detectors can summon emergency responses in the event of falls or other medical emergencies. Older adults can access virtual or “digital destinations” in real time—to buy goods, order food, use patient portals, access financial or government services, and engage in social or recreational activities. We are witnessing a paradigm shift in how older adults can maintain their independence and age in place. Their homes have transformed into environmental monitoring hubs and digital control centers, increasing their safety and health and reducing their dependence on neighborhood and community resources. Although older people are increasingly adopting these solutions, many remain reluctant. This provides the rationale for the ELDERDES model, which identifies the factors that influence older adults' adoption of digital environment technologies and how four categories of digital environment solutions (DES) contribute to their positive residential experiences, improved health outcomes, independent living, and optimal aging. There are many reasons to argue that increasing older people's access to their digital environments will become a more salient arena for research and intervention than primarily adapting the features of their traditional physical or social environments.

Most older people experiencing chronic health problems, physical disabilities, and memory losses are still able to age in place in their own homes. However, they often need help from others to enjoy healthy, active, and independent lives. They turn mostly to family members, mainly women and usually their daughters, daughters-in-law or wives. But caring for frail elders has become more demanding and complex, and these family members often feel physically and emotionally overwhelmed and burnt out. They concede that they cannot do it alone. Others find it more difficult to hold full-or even part-time jobs. Hiring home (direct) care workers to assist their loved ones can be an effective solution to ease their caregiving responsibilities. However, these personal care aides, home health aides, and nursing assistants are already in short supply. Moreover, going forward the aging of the baby boomer population will result in an even greater demand for their services even as these jobs are often unattractive to American-born workers and turnover is high. This country’s immigration policies will make it even more difficult for women caring for older persons to hire these workers. Over 25 percent of home care workers are low-skilled immigrants or foreign-born. However, the Trump administration’s policies reduce the number of immigrants entering the U.S. and specifically choke off the various pathways that enable low-skilled persons to be hirable in the home care sector. Female caregivers seeking relief from their caregiving responsibilities will lose out unless we remove these immigration barriers.

My award-winning paper designed to advance Environmental Gerontology theory proposed that older persons achieve residential normalcy when they are in their residential comfort and residential mastery zones. They then experience pleasurable, hassle-free, and memorable emotional experiences and feel both competent and in control of their everyday environments. However, when older persons fail to achieve residential normalcy, they initiate adaptive behaviors designed to manage or eliminate their discrepant individual and environmental circumstances. To understand both my motivations and abilities to construct this theory, I engage in an academic life review to identify those factors that most influenced my intellectual development. This exercise reveals that several critical and serendipitous interactions with universities, departments, organizations, faculty members, mentors, and colleagues motivated and channeled my research and writing on older people and their residential and care environments. It also emphasizes how throughout my career, a wealth of theoretical and empirical research by other academics both stimulated and reinforced my Environmental Gerontology focus.

The emergence of the age-friendly community movement is a programmatic affirmation of what environmental gerontologists have long argued, namely, that the residential environments occupied by older individuals can influence their ability to age successfully and that solutions are available to optimize individual-environment congruence ( Golant, 2015a ; Scheidt & Windley, 2006 ). This global initiative has been most prominently advanced by the AdvantAge Initiative sponsored by the Visiting Nurse Service of New York (2004), AARP’s Livable Communities initiative (2000), and by the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s), Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities (2007) ( Feldman, Oberlink, Simantov, & Gursen, 2004 ; Kihl, 2005 ; World Health Organization, 2007 ).

An earlier theoretical model equated the construct of residential normalcy with older persons positively appraising their residential environments. Failing to achieve congruent places to live, they initiate assimilative (action) or accommodative (mind) coping strategies. This paper theorizes that the assimilative coping strategies of older persons depend on their secondary appraisal processes whereby they judge the availability, efficaciousness, and viability of their coping options. Older persons with more enriched coping repertoires are theorized as more resilient, making their own decisions, and with access to more resource-rich objectively defined resilient environments. Successful aging formulations infrequently examine how residential environmental adaptations of people influence the quality of their lives. Programmatically, the theory emphasizes the potential of individual and environmental interventions targeting older persons who are not aging successfully.