2012, Vol.18, No.1

JOURNAL OF THE KOREA INSTITUTE OF HEALTHCARE ARCHITECTURE 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 0.46

pISSN : 2733-8649 / eISSN : 2733-8657
https://journal.kci.go.kr/ikiha

In this study, the status of healthcare infrastructure in foreign countries was investigated for a Korean healthcare business planning to expand its business to these countries. Countries selected and surveyed are China, India, Indonesia, and the Middle East. When the surveyors visited the hospitals, the hospital facilities were investigated and medical professionals were interviewed to scrutinize the healthcare conditions in the hospitals. Also studied are healthcare related laws, trend of healthcare policies, hospital operations, medical staffing, and global healthcare service providers. Korea has expanded their overseas healthcare market only to small-sized hospitals and clinics. In order to keep up with global market expansion in the healthcare domain, strategic marketing is required. Especially, the most important key for overseas marketing is to make a synergizing system among hospitals, construction companies, medical equipment providers and IT solution providers. For the next step, the in-depth study will be conducted through real projects in the target countries per type of business.

The purpose of this research is support blind person’s daily walking. In order to achieve the purpose, we investigate how the environmental information is used for their daily walking both in residential and commercial areas considering the characteristics of walking. In the investigation, interview to the persons concerned is carried out and all the conversation with them is recorded with a voice recorder. Moreover, the environmental information that may become clues is plotted on a map together with photos. The results are as follows; (1) Environmental information which the blind persons use is different depending on the role of its own of place, such as place confirmation, direction decision, distance understanding. (2) It is demonstrated that the information acquisition from sound is effective when they especially understand place and location.

As of November 1st 2010, 59% of overall residences in Korea are apartments with 8,185,000 households and when including the multi-unit houses, 71.0% of the overall residences are multifamily houses. The apartments have become the most universal form of residence in Korea and its’ relative weight will continuously increase in the future. Meanwhile, Korea has turned into aging society in 2000 and will turn into the super-aged society by 2026 to display the world’s fastest speed for aging. Majority of the elderly will spend their declining years in apartments. To understand the residence consciousness and its’ properties for unit housing of the elderly residing in apartments, the present study obtained the following results through surveying the 541 nationwide samples. First, the elderly most prefer the mid and high levels(6-9th floors, or 10-15th floors) of apartments. Second, the elderly couples most prefer areas of 85m² while single elderly most prefer 60m². Third, the elderly feel the most inconveniences in bathrooms and showers. Fourth, safety accidents in dwelling of the elderly have no significant correlation with age, gender or their possessed diseases. Fifth, the elderly displayed high satisfaction for their bedrooms. Sixth, there were less tendencies for elderly to feel lack of storage spaces or conduct remodeling. As a result of the analysis, all apartment houses of Korea must support the physical aging of residents and prevent safety accidents in houses to enable Korean aging in place.