The Healthier Homes initiative, supported by TECH, is a four-phased project to understand, test and evaluate if the combination of digital technologies, customer engagement, partnership working, and co-design will lead to positive impacts on home environments and tenant/ resident health and wellbeing. Our initiative aligns with a broad range of national agendas such as Housing to 2040, the National Health and Wellbeing Outcomes Framework for Scotland, Energy Efficiency standards, ensuring everyone has access to a warm, dry, safe, affordable home which meets their needs.

The social housing sector supports some of the most vulnerable and socially excluded people in our communities. We are uniquely placed to help reduce health inequalities for people living across Scotland through the provision of safe and warm homes. The World Health Organization has highlighted that poor housing conditions are one of the main mechanisms through which social and environmental inequality leads to health inequality. Housing can be directly influenced through housing condition, security of tenure, overcrowding and suitability of an individual’s needs. Housing can also indirectly impact health through affordability and poverty, housing satisfaction, choice and control, social isolation, access to key health or social care services.

More and more housing providers are considering how Technology, specifically the Internet of Things (IoT), might support improvements in service delivery. Adopting IoT introduces a broad range of new considerations for the housing sector including digital connectivity and architecture, staff skill sets, service redesign and tenant acceptance. Our Healthier Homes pathfinders are working hard to implement technology and demonstrate how it can monitor the quality of our tenant’s environment, leading to better quality of life. Through our initiative we hope to showcase the successes and highlight the risks of embracing new technologies and show how data created in these devices can be used for good, for both our tenants and our business’.

To hear more about the Healthier Homes Initiative please contact Stephanie Elliot Selliot@sfha.co.uk

• Steph Elliot is Technology Enabled Care in Housing (TECH) lead at the SFHA