On the development of a friendly rest room

The EU-project Friendly Rest room (2002-2004) aims at developing a user-Friendly Rest Room for elderly and persons with limited abilities being facilitated by recent sociological, ergonomic & anthropometrical studies and technology developments. It has been initiated by a company ATI in Jeruzalem, who found 9 other partners to join the consortium out of several countries. These institutes vary in expertise from rehabilitation to social sciences, user societies, nursing institutes and institutes focusing on design ergonomics and to integrate these disciplines there is an industrial design team. Also included is a commercial company to emphasize the realistic outcome. And last but not at least an ethical review committee is involved in the project to verify what is asked of the participating users and especially what is done with the response. Because there is no method in the handbooks, an interdisciplinary approach is followed, starting with observing at the primary user level where possible, but also other types of users were defined; the secondary user assisting the user, and also the person who does the maintenance, and the architect or the builder who make decisions about starting points in the development process. Without knowing the outcome at this moment, we can predict that an unique collection of user behaviour and cultural influences with variations from all over Europe will be compiled, that will take care of the changing rest room needs of our continuous growing aged population. Existing anthropometric tables might not be a great help in deciding where to support users with special needs in all the different countries, although the method to measure small samples of the target population could add actionable knowledge for the design team. This could be of importance especially when this method is more dynamic or functional like when measuring a reach envelope (dynamic) instead of a reach depth (static). Moreover the experience in a nursing and occupational health environment of participating institutes will contribute to analyse the optimum human-product-interaction, which is necessary to develop the product idea of a smart toilet that will compensate the special needs of a user in a friendly way. The production ready and tested prototype should be completed at the end of 2004.