Jean Yu studies how Singapore's aging population experiences extreme heat. With seniors projected to reach 33% of residents by 2050 and temperatures climbing to 30°C, she's using wearable sensors and surveys to measure how older adults actually feel in their neighborhoods, aiming to make aging-in-place safer and more livable.
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Hello, my name is Jean Yu. I'm currently a PhD researcher from the Sea-City Interface module at the Future Cities Lab Global Singapore. My research focuses on a human-centred thermal study of the ageing population here in Singapore. More specifically, I'm trying to understand heat exposure and thermal comfort for this specific demographic and its implications on aging in place. Aging in place generally means the ability of older adults to live independently and safely in their own homes and communities for as long as possible without the need to relocate to an institutional setting. It's a prominent strategy used by many cities to address the growing aging population as it has benefits to both health and wellbeing. In 2018, there was a study that was done in Singapore that showed that about 86% of older Singaporeans prefer to age in place. So for Singapore, by 2050, it's projected that over a third of the residents will be 65 and over. And also the daily average temperatures are also projected to reach up to 30 degrees Celsius. That's an unprecedented number of urban residents that are vulnerable to heat. And there are negative consequences to this. One is that already around the world, the heat-related mortality rates have increased about 167% in the past 30 years. But also, the specific demographic is vulnerable to heat because of different physiological factors. So their ability to cope with the heat is reduced. If the older buildings and neighborhoods are not designed for the current kind of climate realities, then aging in place will become unsafe. It will also affect outdoor mobility, and also social interaction may decline as well. Despite this urgency, there is still a lack of empirical data related to the older adults' thermal environments and heat exposure. So this research is trying to help understand the intersection again between climate change and the aging population so that cities can become more age-ready and heat resilient. So outdoor thermal comfort research has shifted from using computer-based simulations to a more human-centered approach because of the increasing awareness of human subjective perception data at the pedestrian level. So wearable technology has promising opportunities to advance thermal comfort research, but this technology has rarely been used for older adults or seniors, mostly because of the presumptions of the barrier of using this kind of technology. This, uh, study uses a mixed methods approach to collect both subjective data and objective data. Subjective data is collected through, um, watch-based surveys that are done in real time, and the objective data is collected through environmental sensors. The environmental sensors collect near-body temperature data, humidity, dew point, and also a heat stress index. With this research, I really hope to demonstrate the need for incorporating lived thermal experiences of individuals into context-sensitive and human-centered climate adaptive planning.
