Research On Assistive Cane Co-design For Elderly With Lower Leg Disability

With the further expansion of China’s aging problem,the number of disabled elderly people is also increasing.Among them,the elderly with moderate and severe disability have more serious loss of independent living ability and gained more social attention.Although the slightly disabled elderly account for the largest proportion,the application of rehabilitation AIDS is not ideal,and they lack enough attention to life needs such as self-travel,which aggravates the risk of mild disability to moderate disability,and brings a greater burden to the elderly themselves,family members and social medical rehabilitation resources.The research focuses on the travel problem of the elderly with mild leg disability,and studies the ability and value of walking stick as a rehabilitation aid.In the stage of literature research,the definition,crowd characteristics,behavior characteristics,value and risks of elderly people with mild leg disability are studied.In the stage of product research,considering the flexibility and expandability of walking stick,the walking stick for the elderly is taken as the research object,and the analysis is carried out from the horizontal research of defining classification,material and structure comparison,and the vertical research of component module and man-machine size.In the stage of user research,the elderly with mild leg disability and their caregivers were investigated by means of on-the-spot investigation,questionnaire survey and user interview,in order to find out the needs of target groups in travel behavior patterns,travel scenes and cane use.In the stage of product design,through the design of collaborative design toolkit and the development of collaborative design workshops,the above research conclusions are verified and supplemented,and the feasible product directions are discussed in terms of collaborative divergence and concept.Based on this,the author designed a walking stick for the elderly with mild leg disability to travel daily,with flexibility,conciseness and freedom of choice as the core features,to solve their scene needs in auxiliary lighting,personalized configuration,walking management,picking up things,height configuration,etc.,and combined with the user’s preference conclusion in the research stage,the product shape,material and color matching were adapted and simplified.The dimension is optimized by combining ergonomics,and according to the national standard documents related to products and the open standards of Chinese adult body size,the safety inspection and standardized design of key dimensions such as use height,handle diameter and length,and leg diameter are carried out.Compared with the existing walking stick for the elderly,this scheme optimizes the experience of details such as lighting adjustment,component configuration,observable height adjustment,etc.based on the user’s travel scene,and shows modern and daily design requirements in terms of usage and appearance,thus reducing the user’s use cost and psychological burden,improving the user’s travel experience under the intervention of walking stick,and then better accepting the concept and lifestyle of normalization and active aging of assistive devices.