The Evidence-based Design Of Healing Landscape For Elderly People In China

Healing landscapes are landscape types in healthcare facilities, by absorbing natural elements and interaction between human and environment, making conducive effects on users’ body-mind health. The generalized concept of healing landscape for elderly people can include gardens in long-term care facilities and green spaces which specificly designed for health promotion. Under social background of severe aging phenomenon, the importance of living environments for elderly people is getting prominent. Healing landscape is essential guarantee of the promotion of elderly people’s health and life quality, also helps to make economical benefit and social hamony. Healing landscape should adopt evidence-based design(EBD) method, so as to well satisfy user’s needs and develope landscape’s healing effects. Therefore it is important to carry out research on EBD of healing landscape for our country’s elderly people. In regards to this issue, the thesis discusses it from three levels.Part 1 is the research basis, which discusses the 2 major concepts of healing landscape and EBD. Firstly it systematically concludes healing landscape’s history and research classification, in historical part it conducts comparison between western and our condition, while in research content part it specifically introduces on 4 aspects, which are landscape’s healing effects, horticultural therapy, environment-behavior health, and human’s biophilia theory. Then it discusses the EBD, including its birth background, the concept, and method, also using case study to explore its application in healing landscape.Part 2 is empirical research, which conducts quantitative research in gardens of long-term care facilities and urban green space for elderly people. In first study, it conducted physiological and psychological measurement in blood pressure, heart rate and power of concentration before and after elderly people’s activity in gardens, and questionnaire was applied to inquire usage and perceived space characteristic. The result shows the garden activity has positive effects on body-mind health, while the health outcomes and usage are affected by space characteristic of gardens. In second study, it tested elderly people’s EMG and mental fatigue recovery in different landscape types. The result indicates the elderly people have obvious better body relaxing effect in natural landscape than interior, and overall have fine mental fatigue recovery. The plants landscape has prominent body-relaxing effect, and in some senarios it has Gender difference. The discussion and specific landscape planning and design strategies are put forward based on these results.Part 3 is design studies, which discusses healing landscape design for ordinary elderly people and people with dementia. Based on understanding the significance of outdoor garden environments for elderly people and literature review of relative design researches, it proposes EBD models for 2 environments. Then it makes detailed discussion on design strategies. Finally it conducts case studies and POE to give further explanation on design guildlines and keypoints.