Healthy Home, Healthy Self:
A New Frontier for Wellbeing

Homes are becoming the epicentre of health and wellbeing, reshaping how we live, rest, and recover. This article explores how indoor environments, restful living, and personalised care at home are transforming everyday life, uncovering opportunities for innovative design to redefine the home as a catalyst for healthier living.

Health and wellbeing begin at home, where many of the building blocks for a good life – safety, warmth, family connection, community, education and work – are formed. For many, a healthy home reflects one’s own health, and taking care of the health of your home is, by extension, seen as caring for your family’s health. This growing understanding is reshaping how consumers interact with products and services that support their wellbeing and prompting consumer brands—from food and beverage to appliances — to increasingly view the home as the place where significant health-conscious decisions are made.

But certain factors are jeopardising the health of the home—and, therefore, the health of those within. Indoor air pollution is rising, driven by sources like heating systems, cooking appliances, humidity levels and everyday cleaning products. The effects these indoor pollutants have on people’s health range from mild symptoms such as sneezing, runny nose or coughing to more serious conditions such as asthma, COPD, heart conditions and strokes.

This trend particularly affects The Indoor Generation – the first generation of young people spending more time indoors than outdoors, often prioritising on-screen interactions over face-to-face human interactions. And it’s not just children who are affected; adults are also spending more time indoors, whether connecting with friends through social media, online shopping, watching on-demand media streaming or working from home.

Unsurprisingly, consumer brands are starting to turn their attention to the health of the home in a bid to support people’s wellness. In the coming years, we will start to see the rise of domestic care spaces and products – smart responsive solutions designed to create optimal conditions to support holistic wellbeing.

The evolution of the smart home will play a pivotal role in this future, moving beyond monitoring and data representation to products and systems that can adjust sensory aspects of an indoor environment based on the occupants’ needs and real-time and forecasted environmental data – creating personalised and responsive spaces.

Design for restful living

Another vital area to health and wellbeing at home is sleep, rest and relaxation. We know that having a healthy amount of sleep is crucial to wellbeing, and that a lack of good quality sleep and rest can have a negative impact on our physical and mental health.

Yet, many factors interfere in people’s sleep and ability to relax, from work and financial pressures to technology consumption behaviours and even diet and exercise.  Millennials and Gen-Zs in particular, cite screen-time and news consumption as key contributing factors to poor sleep.

Developing healthy sleeping habits requires an awareness and understanding of behavioural cycles and their direct (and indirect) effects, to make lasting improvements. However, our living spaces and environments also play a critical role.

While temperature, air quality, sound and light are some of the more obvious contributing factors to good or bad sleep and relaxation; other sensory aspects such as tactility, smell and haptics also contribute to creating an optimal sensory-scape that promotes comfort, restfulness and lasting behavioural changes.

The Sleep Economy (products and services to aid sleep) has become big business across many sectors over the years and is projected to grow, as consumers increasingly seek solutions for a better night’s sleep.

But a curious tension point exists, as many of these sleep products and services leverage technology, which can both be an enabler and a barrier where it comes to sleep and relaxation. Brands entering this space must ensure that the technology itself sits in the background, allowing real-world sensory aspects to come to the fore to create experiences that enable people to truly rest.

A hub for personalised care

We couldn’t talk about health and wellness at home without addressing the growing Care at Home industry – medical treatments that are shifting from traditional healthcare settings to the homes of patients.

Pandemic-related factors have driven a rethink of Care at Home over the past few years. Trends like telemedicine and home health monitoring are already improving access to care, while developments in AI, wearables, robotics, and personalised medicine promise to transform healthcare at home landscape even further.

This other dimension of health and wellness at home is placing new demands on domestic spaces, requiring brands and designers to reexamine multi-modal living; creating home products and environments that are adaptable to and fit for even more specific healthcare needs.

Discrete medical devices, medication and equipment storage systems and practice-to-home services will create an opportunity for new product typologies as the gap between consumer-products and healthcare-products closes. Thoughtful design (and redesign) of products and systems for use within this new context and by the patients themselves, will be essential.

We expect to see new design languages and new colour, material and finish (CMF) applications emerge from this crossover between consumer-brands and pharma; with a range of new domestic medical products whose aesthetics blend comfortably within a home environment yet communicate credibility and reassurance to patients – a deep understanding of semiotics will be key to striking this balance.

As consumers increasingly look towards their homes to support both their everyday wellness and medical needs, design must balance comfort with functionality, fostering spaces that truly support health.

At PDD, with deep expertise in both the healthcare and consumer sectors, and a clear understanding of the essential elements of the healthcare continuum – prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and monitoring, we are in a unique position to identify synergies and explore the future of health and wellbeing at home. From research to the design and engineering of appealing products and experiences, we strive to make a meaningful impact. If you want to uncover opportunities in the shift towards healthier, more connected living, please get in touch.