Summary report of the 2020 FORUM Annual Lecture with contributions from Prof Karyn Morrissey

Excerpt: Houses, homes and happiness

Health and wellbeing are strongly influenced by environmental factors, including the environments in which we live and work, and our social connectedness. Collectively, social determinants of health have a greater impact on health and wellbeing than healthcare.

As well as data from individuals, information can now be remotely collected on multiple environmental factors with the potential to affect health, and analysed to identify correlations between such factors and health outcomes.

Professor Karyn Morrissey, at the European Centre for the Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter, described how the ERDF-funded Smartline project is taking this approach in the South-West of England.

Seeking to understand the role that digital technology can play in addressing health and wellbeing, the Smartline project has installed an extensive digital infrastructure to collect indoor environmental data across 250 households in coastal towns. These households are all social housing tenants and, whilst social housing properties are generally well maintained, tenants of social housing are on average an older, lower-income population, with complex health needs.

The environmental information collected is being integrated with more traditional data types such as surveys and interviews to tease apart key influences on health and wellbeing in the home and wider community.

The project involves a wide range of stakeholders, including local housing associations and digital enterprises. It also aims to develop a better understanding of the digital technology readiness of individuals and communities, and to raise awareness of their needs in order to encourage innovation to address them.