Stephen Golant, Ph.D., will give a lecture titled "Gerontechnological Solutions for Aging in Place." This lecture is co-sponsored by the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy. It will be followed by a No-Host Social Hour at Proof at the FSU Student Union.

The future will witness the worldwide growth of older people with functional limitations or disabilities having difficulties traveling to their neighborhoods and other community destinations to satisfy their obligatory and discretionary everyday needs. This lecture argues that their dwelling environments deserve new scrutiny because they are becoming more salient and positively experienced places to live, better enabling their mobility-limited occupants to access their outside worlds. The catalyst is the emergence of gerontechnological innovations relying on digital and sensor technologies, offering these vulnerable older occupants a new category of dwelling connectivity solutions—constituting a paradigm shift—whereby goods, care, services, social supports, information, and leisure activities can be delivered to their dwellings. Consequently, their homes have become "control centers" dynamically integrated with their outside worlds.

Older people can cope more effectively with their declines and losses because their ability to live independently is less threatened by mobility limitations, travel challenges to destinations, and less age-friendly physical design features. By occupying more supportive and connected dwellings, they have overall more positive and salient residential mastery emotional experiences and feel more competent, empowered, and in control of their lives and environment.

Planning or policy recommendations directed to the World Health Organization (WHO) and its age-friendly city/community agenda highlight how dwelling environments incorporating gerontechnological solutions are becoming more critical influences of "active aging." WHO should allocate more resources to dwelling interventions that increase the availability, awareness, and acceptability of these gerontechnological solutions.

Dr. Stephen Golant is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Florida (Gainesville) and earlier was an associate professor at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on the housing, mobility, long-term care, and gerontechnology needs of older adults.

Dr. Golant is a Fellow of the Gerontological Society of America (GSA) and a Fulbright Senior Scholar award recipient. In 2012, he received the Richard M. Kalish Award from the Gerontological Society of America for his insightful and innovative publications on aging and life development in the behavioral and social sciences. In 2024, he received GSA’s M. Powell Lawton Award funded by the Polisher Research Institute of Abramson Senior Care, which recognizes significant contributions in gerontology leading to innovations in gerontological treatment, practice or service, prevention, and amelioration of symptoms or barriers.

He has been a consultant or adviser to various firms, universities, state government agencies, and national organizations, including advising the Congressionally appointed Commission on Affordable Housing and Health Facility Needs for Seniors in the 21st Century (Seniors Commission).

Print and Web-based media have often featured his research and ideas, and he has appeared on numerous television and radio programs and blogs addressing the needs of older people. He is currently a regular contributor to Booming Encore, a social media site designed to support and help baby boomers live their best lives: boomingencore.com