A Research of Bath-Toilet Facilities Using in the Elderly Clustering Institute

• Main Authors: Hung-Fun Yang, 楊恆輔
• Other Authors: Ming-Shih Chen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/50432719333885741627

碩士 === 東海大學 === 工業設計學系 === 95 === The issue of the elderly is concerned recently as the coming of aging society of Taiwan. The space of bathroom is one of the highest accident rate fields at home. As the reason of dry-wet coexistence situation of the bathroom in Taiwan, the elderly are much harder to act in it. As there is more and more elderly moving into the “elder care centers,” this research is target on the elderly who moved into them. In order to know the differences of the hardware facilities in the bathrooms between private and public elder care centers I go deep into these two kinds of centers. To find out the needs, troubles, and habits of the elderly while bathing and excreting and make them bathing and excreting more convenient is the main objective of this research. It begins by “field survey” in this research, and observes the facilities of these two kinds of elder care centers in the bathroom in the viewpoint of a researcher. And then evaluate and classify the data. Secondly, I try to figure out the needs and feelings of the elderly users by “operating consciousness questionnaire.” By this questionnaire investigation this research finds out the troubles and problems when operating and acting in the bathrooms. From this research, focuses on bathrooms of the elder care centers, we know that designs for the elders’ bathrooms mostly accent on functional and human factory ideas instead of the viewpoints of users’ needs. After integrated investigation, the problems of the elderly in the bathrooms can be classified into two parts as “behaving feelings” and “hardware facilities.” In the part of behaving feelings, they are mostly related to physical degenerations including the actions as turning around, squatting and standing, and keeping balance. As to the part of hardware facilities, most of them are caused by the facilities which were not designed in the viewpoint of actual operating situations. The numbers of supporting aids and their inappropriate setting is the main problem of the elderly in the part of hardware facilities. Otherwise the lack of warming conditions is another inconvenience for the elderly acting in the bathrooms. Although there are no other significant shortcomings, but the satisfactions are generally law because of the physical degeneration. Still the elderly get used to the problems as time goes by. As a whole, an ideal bathroom for the elderly in the eldercare center should satisfy not only the users’ but also designers’ and the centers’ needs at the same time. Under the permission of enactment we should add some supporting aids in the bathrooms and educate the elder users the necessity of them at the same time. The elderly may act in the bathrooms favorably and conveniently if we make the bathrooms comfortable and safe.