Smart Technologies for the Environmental Design of Smaller Urban Centres

Abstract

The present study focuses on welfare measures and specifically on healthcare. The challenge we would like to accept is to provide efficient healthcare to residents in an isolated area without health services, maintaining the same level of healthcare ensured by hospitals. The innovative design, that we want to experience, is closely linked to the use of ICT, information and communication technologies, because these technologies would be able to perform autonomously multiple functions, using remote control. Telemedicine or “virtual health” is a particular branch of ICT that can improve future quality of living in a marginal urban center as a tool to ensure prompt access to expert advice, as well as patient monitoring, wherever patients and medical centers may currently be located. Mobile technology applied to healthcare could stimulate advances in telemedicine: handheld and mobile phones, equipped with specific software with advanced diagnostic instruments, being small and user friendly, could enhance medical services if integrated in houses and if the users might have a direct access to them. The research consists, in a first step, the analysis of the main technologies for active and healthy ageing and then re-designed an healthcare system structure in a case study (a small town near Palermo), in terms of usability and accessibility for health authorities and, most of all, patients. We chose as a case study a little mountain town, which because of its location, is forced to wallow in a condition of marginality, far from fundamental services for citizens.