Accidents among third age people due to the use of home-made toilet chair

The world's population is ageing, with more developed regions leading the process, because of increasing survival to older ages as well as smaller numbers of births. Consequently, the support of this ever expanding elderly population has become increasing concern. In India approximately 20 per cent of people aged 70 years or older, and 50 per cent of people aged 85 and over, report difficulties in such basic activities of daily living as bathing and toileting. The increase in the number of old people is presumably also increasing the number of old people with disabilities specially related to joints which create hindrance or cause pain in using Indian toilets. The middle income group families in India are unable to construct European type toilets for their older parents due to reasons like space problem in their homes, financial problem and sometimes the family doesn't bother about elders to take so much pain for them. Thus, to overcome from this problem the family members of the third age people had arranged the home made toilet chairs for their older parents by using ordinary chairs and making a hole at the middle of the chair with a removable small bucket, but no consideration was given for the dimensions of those toilet chairs and the body dimensions of third age people, which results in the accidents during and after its use. This study was planned to sort out the dimensions for ergonomically designed toilet chair to reduce the cases of accidents among third age people. For this purpose anthropometric data of 200 people of 60-70 years of age as well as the dimensions of home- made toilet chairs were taken and also the cases of accidents were noted among third age people of Pantnagar and Rudrapur. Research design used for the study was descriptive as well as experimental and purposive sampling was used for data collection. Results showed that there was a great difference between the toilet chair dimensions and the body dimensions of third age people which caused accidents and with the help of anthropometric data the dimensions of ergonomic toilet chair was decided to overcome this problem.