Aging in Place: Designing, Adapting, and Enhancing the Home Environment

Provide a comfortable living environment for the aging!Aging in Place: Designing, Adapting, and Enhancing the Home Environment gives you a complete examination of current trends in adaptive home designs for older adults. As a therapist, designer, architect, builder, home planner, social worker, community organizer, or gerontologist, Aging in Place will show you innovative home designs and studies for creating environments that offer optimal living for aging adults. Complete with diagrams, floor plans, and tables, Aging in Place helps you to improve the quality of life for the elderly by offering them state-of-the-art designs that encourage independence and dignity. This unique and exciting book covers topics such as universal design which strives to create everyday environments and products like door handles and light switches that are usable by all people to the greatest extent possible, regardless of age or ability. Aging in Place will also show you how to:

• use follow-up visits by occupational therapists to ensure successful use of home modifications
• create environments that are helpful for vision rehabilitation by using controlled lighting and color schemes
• evaluate the quality of life for elderly people living in personal dwellings, specialized housing, and nursing homes
• explore architectural barriers and the uses of helping devices for elderly people
• examine research critiques of adaptive toilet equipment
• investigate modifications that have been made in homes for the elderly in India
• analyze ways in which elderly people have changed their homes to make the telephone more accessibleAging in Place is a complete guide to understanding the needs and latest trends in optimizing the living space of elderly persons. The book gives you access to several studies on elderly people's environmental needs and preferences in regard to modifications in personal and public dwellings. This information will assist you with better serving the elderly by helping them live more independently.

Ellen D. Taira, Jodi L. Carlson