Abstract
This paper reports the results on age and gender of Korean elderly people for the level of difficulty in performing household tasks (meal preparation, grocery shopping, house cleaning, laundry), personal tasks (dressing, bathing, grooming), transfer tasks (getting in and out of chairs, getting in and out of bath-tub, using stairs) and management tasks (using telephone, accessing mail, operating door locks). A questionnaire based on the Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scale was constructed and administered to 40 Korean elderly subjects aged from 65 to 84(mean age: 74.5, SD: 5.8) in Busan. Additionally, a logistic regression was performed with age (continuous variable) and gender as predictor variables, and reponses to individual questions as the categorical ordinal response variables. To determine appropriate age separation at which difficulty levels in performing activities of daily living change, a discriminant analysis was performed on the responses. All predictor variables were used in the analysis. Accommodating age related changes in functional abilities, and increasing functional independence of elderly people will entail significant design modifications to products, systems and environments for daily use and living.
