Influence of Aging on Feature of Discrimination of Tactile Symbol Printed by Screen Printing

Abstract

International Organization for Standardization (ISO) issued guidelines for developers of standards to address the needs of older persons and those with disabilities in 2001 (ISO/IEC Guide 71). Japanese Standards Association and Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry have recently been forming several exploratory committees regarding standardization of aocessible design based on the Guide 71. Many Japanese conmpanies are also planning to review their existing product designs for giving consideration to older persons.In doing that, one way that is essential is to investigate relationship between aging and features of human five sense. In the features of five senses, however, we have a shortage of data about tactile senses. In this study, focusing on tactile symbols used on tactile guide nmap, we conducted one experiment to investigate influence of aging on feature of discrimination of tactile symbols. Concretely, we compared feature of discrimination of three tactile symbols between older persons and younger persons. Fifteen persons over age 65 and fifteen younger university students in their 20's participated as subjects in our experiment. They were asked to discriminate the presented tactile symbols one-by-one. The results show that younger persons could discriminate the tactile symbols more correctly and faster than older persons regardless of tactile symbol size. From this study, we could find out one degree of decrease of feature of discrimination of tactile symbols by aging.