Ming Lohman is a man on the move, he comes and goes as he pleases. That's one of the benefits of living at Tiger Place. It can take care of Lohman as much or as little as he wants.

Tiger Place is the only type of facility like it in the country. It's built to nursing home standards, it's licensed as intermediate care, but its operated and regulated as independent housing.

"Older people struggle because you move from your home to senior housing, and as your care needs increase you have to move from senior housing to assisted living, as your care needs increase into nursing homes," said RN Marilyn Rantz of the Sinclair School of Nursing. "Its just like living in your own home, but as your care needs increase we wrap more services around you."

In many ways, Tiger Place beats the average senior citizens home. Besides the basic one-and two-bedroom apartments with kitchens, baths, screened porches and garages, there's an on-site movie theatre, a hair salon and you can bring your pet too.

That's all besides a state of the art monitoring system.

It's an effort to help people "age in place," meaning once you call Tiger Place home, you never have to leave despite your health care needs increasing.

It took experts from several fields to design and execute the plan.

"We all have the abilty to answer and address interesting research questions, but when it comes to the questions of how do help people stay in their own homes and age in place and use technology to accomplish that, it really demands all of these different diciplines to come together becuase no one person in one dicipline has all of the answers to solve the problem," Director of Center for Eldercare Marjorie Skubic said.

Meaning it's no problem for Ming to head home to his farm on the weekend and back home to Tiger Place for the week.

Tiger Place also serves as a natural, living research laboratory. Residents are invited to participate in student and faculty research projects at Mizzou. Right now there are projects underway for monitoring well-being and medication administration.