Abstract
Elderly people often have different environmental requirements for health and safety, comfort and performance than younger people. This is related to the deterioration in sensory, physiological, neural and cognitive systems associated with age. Ideally standards should be inclusive and cover all populations of interest. This is not always possible however and a pragmatic approach is to develop standards that advise on special requirements for elderly people. Responses of elderly people to the visual and lighting, thermal, acoustic and other environments are presented. Reduction in visual acuity and hearing thresholds are obvious effects of age which are well understood. Although systems deteriorate with age, however, people gain experience and learn how to compensate for deterioration by appropriate behaviour. The differences in adaptive opportunity between elderly and younger people should be identified by standards makers when specifying appropriate environments.
This paper describes the ‘inclusive’ philosophy of standards for human response to the physical environment. It describes ‘accessible design’ and how standards for physical environments occupied by elderly people can contribute to accessible design. The production of standards that include the requirements of elderly people has exposed the data gap between what is required and what is known. If standards are to be truly representative of the whole, global population then data on responses to environments should be collected across all groups of people and not just specialist groups often used by researchers. It is not inevitable that elderly people are handicapped by their environment and appropriate and inclusive standards can contribute to accessible environments for all.
