Abstract
Getting in and out of a bathtub during bathing can be difficult as people grow older, but Japanese people prefer to go into the tub. Experiments were conducted on the effectiveness of handrail positioning to assist their bathing activities. The height of a tub edge (measured from the outside) was changed along with different positioning of a handrail, both vertical and horizontal. General finding was that subjects preferred the floor height between 350 mm and 450 mm for the tub edge. The preferred handrail height they grabbed was between 760 mm and 1060 mm from the floor, with acceptable handrail position just above the edge or 100 mm inside the tub. Observation of subjects’ behavior and past experiences suggest that seating area such as bath board be provided for frail seniors to sit down to get in and out of the tub rather than forcing them to step across.
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References
Yada, H., Goto, Y., Tanaka, S., Ukitya, N., Kose, S.: Bathroom handrail requirements for use by the elderly. Part 1. Basic experiment on allowable height of bathtub upstand. In: Summaries of Technical Papers of Annual Meeting of AIJ 1992 -Architectural Design-, pp. 941–942 (1992). (in Japanese)
Goto, Y., Yada, H., Tanaka, S., Kose, S., Ukiya, N.: Bathroom handrail requirements for use by the elderly. Part 2. Basic experiment on preferred position and layout of handrails. In: Summaries of Technical Papers of Annual Meeting of AIJ 1992 -Architectural Design-, pp. 943–944 (1992). (in Japanese)
Goto, Y., Yada, H., Kose, S., Ukiya, N., Kikuchi, Y.: Bathroom handrail requirements for use by the elderly. Part 3. Preferred position and layout of handrails for bathtub. In: Summaries of Technical Papers of Annual Meeting of AIJ 1993 -Architectural Design-, pp. 931–932 (1993). (in Japanese)
Kose, S., Sugimoto, Y., Goto, Y.: Acceptable handrail position for use by the elderly. In: Designing for Everyone - Proceedings of the Eleventh Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, pp. 1116–1118 (1991)
Acknowledgements
The experiments were conducted as part of joint research between the Building Research Institute, the Ministry of Construction, and the Comprehensive Housing R&D Institute, Sekisui House, Ltd. Summaries of these researches were reported at the Architectural Institute of Japan Annual meetings in 1992 [1, 2] and 1993 [3].
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Goto, Y., Kose, S., Tanaka, S., Yada, H. (2020). Bathroom Handrail Requirements for Use by the Elderly. In: Di Bucchianico, G., Shin, C., Shim, S., Fukuda, S., Montagna, G., Carvalho, C. (eds) Advances in Industrial Design. AHFE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1202. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51194-4_26
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-51194-4_26
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