Chapter 5: Conclusions
5.4 Recommendations for Elderly Assistance and Rehabilitation
5.4.5 Design Guidelines for the design of elderly care
Several countries are undergoing an unprecedented demographic transformation that comes with a rise in the aging population. The current statistics showed that a gigantic increase in this population in the past few decades and forecasting this increase as double in the next few decades. This change leads to a rethink on how to enhance life for the existing and the future elderly generations, enabling them to
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live fulfilling lives and stay active and healthy in their household situations. To achieve this, there is a need for a transdisciplinary and synergistic approach that encourages designers to work in collaboration with various departments and domain experts and the elderly population to pursue design solutions that value the whole society. There are several areas in the elderly context that need to be improved. The scope of the present study is limited to selective musculoskeletal diseases. As such, this study presents sets of recommendations for designers on how to apply the current approaches and the results of this study to provide foundation knowledge on addressing age-related problems associated with older people and their subsequent solutions by applying design principles and set design rules in the design space. This study suggests for designers to use these recommendations and guidelines to decide how to implement design principles in the design of assistive solutions for older people and manage their musculoskeletal conditions which limit most of the older people from daily life activities. The guidelines shed light on designing for the elderly in assistance against disability and management of a chronic disease that affects the daily life activities of older people. As such, two main recommendations are suggested for future designers. First, how future designers can utilize their design skills to conduct ergonomic interventions for the design of assistive solutions and secondly how they can conduct interventional research in contract with design to reach to the roots of age-related problems in elderly and their subsequent design solutions in the form of rehabilitation of a particular chronic disease. The present research is multifaceted, which approaches other domain knowledge and experiences, and this could be an important limitation for future designers. This research shares methodological experiences from two types of age-related problems in the elderly, which designed and evaluated two types of interventions to improve the performance of older people. This adds empirical illustrations to existing design practices for elderly rehabilitation and assistance, which is difficult to address with the current design approaches.
Generally, design for older people focused on their social aspects for counseling about their psychological wellbeing and changing behavior for a healthy lifestyle. These practices might have useful outcomes for some people, however, they might harm the independent life of older people because counseling and guiding usually require caregiving and special assistance which most of the older people cannot afford, especially those in developing countries. The proposed guidelines guide future designers on how age-related problems can be tackled by extending the current design practice into multidisciplinary interventional research to evaluate the performance of older people and to provide assistance and rehabilitation solutions.
Within the current scope, design for elderly assistance and rehabilitation are the main areas in which designers can contribute a positive influence in society. They are encouraged to incorporate interdisciplinary design solutions that can help improve the performance of older people. The process of the guidelines has gone through the following key steps to compile a set of design
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5.4.5.1 Analyze Age-related Problems
The first stage to address age-related problems is to identify and analyze secondary data available in governmental and worldwide reports and statistics on the older population. The present study considers Parkinson‘s, arthritis, spine abnormality, and LBP conditions in the elderly.
5.4.5.2 Analyze Context
Secondly, these problems are analyzed with the current elderly context based on the problems and challenges associated with the elderly. In the present study, a pilot study was arranged to understand the challenges caused by each of the conditions. Parkinson's and arthritis cause challenges with mouse use among older people who use computers for office related work. Prolonged sitting while using the computer causes persistent LBP among older people.
5.4.5.3 Clarify Elderly Challenges
Thirdly, the challenges caused by each of the conditions are further analyzed and equated with functional disabilities. This stage requires an understanding of chronic conditions and their etiology.
Etiology is the process of understanding the causes and consequences of chronic diseases. In the present study, the challenges caused by using a computer mouse are due to poor motor control skills.
The persistent LBP is caused by spine abnormality that is associated with prolonged sitting and continuous setting postures.
5.4.5.4 Design Interventional Research
Fourth, design possible solutions and strategies to design experimental setups to reach to the roots of the challenges and problems with older people. This stage requires subject recruitment and selection of subjects for experimental research. The present study design repeated measures within and between-subjects factors to understand the effects of cursor freeze time as design strategies on elderly mouse task performance. The study design pretest/posttest experimental setup to measure the effects of an exercise object and protocols on elderly LBP conditions.
5.4.5.5 Conduct Experimental Research
The first stage requires experimental research that must be conducted to understand the cause and effect relationship between the sets of strategies defined by the designers and the responses of the elderly, both physical and mental responses. There are two types of interventions designed in this study. Firstly, an ergonomic intervention in which the ergonomic assessment was conducted to understand a successful mouse use by measuring discomfort associated with the mouse use. Secondly, an exercise intervention was conducted for five weeks to understand the effect of the exercise on LBP over time.
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5.4.5.6 Report Results and Implementation
In the final stage, the results are reported, and solutions are further designed and polished for real-time applications for the actual subjects. In the present study, a mouse assistance application is designed that can determine a successful mouse use for clicking related tasks for improved mouse task performance. Based on the results, the exercise object and protocols are designed as an alternative treatment for LBP in older people. The illustration of this solution is presented in Figure 38 below.
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Figure 38. Guidelines illustration for elderly mouse assistance and LBP rehabilitation
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