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| There is emerging evidence that well-designed physical environment can improve the elderly's health, wellbeing and care. As the study on building design and quality of the elderly's life has been a focus, the necessity and significance of developing assessment tools for the elderly's living environment is recognized. However the effectiveness and development limitations of the tools developed have been matters of continues debate often challenging the universality. This paper tries to conduct a comparative study on the existing assessment tools of the senior's living environment, building on a rigorous literature review. 9 tools from the UK and the US are selected for study including Evaluation of The elderly's Living Environments (EVOLE), the architecture profession method, Therapeutic Environment Screening Survey for Residential Care (TESS-RC), Sheffield Care Environment Assessment Matrix (SCEAM), Multiphasic Environmental Assessment Procedure (MEAP), Therapeutic Environment Screening Survey for Nursing Homes (TESS-NH), Professional Environmental Assessment Procedure (PEAP), Scales for the Assessment of Environments for the Confused Elderly (SAECE), and the Nursing Unit Rating Scale (NURS). The tool's suitability for different building typology, aims and scopes of the tool, evaluation domains, assessment architectural elements, instrument's form and the methodology adopted therein, and development methodologies are analyzed and reviewed in this paper. It intends to offer reference for choosing a suitable tool to conduct an environment study or developing a new tool. |
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| Keywords:environment evaluation;the elderly; tool; comparative study |
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