Adapted clothes for the mobility impaired

Abstract

Adapted clothes are defined as clothing, specially designed for people with physical disabilities, the elderly, the infirm and post-surgery patients who may have difficulty dressing themselves due to an inability to manipulate closures, such as buttons and zippers, or due to a lack of a full range of motion required for self-dressing eg. arthritis sufferers, quadriplegics and paraplegics. For estimation of main requirements to clothes for the disabled, who move with the help of wheelchairs, we used the method of questioning. The majority of respondents expressed their opinion that the most convenient everyday clothing for them is a sport suit. On the base of the results of questioning was developed a sport suit for wheel chair users, which has some peculiarities of design. In the sports jacket we provided the ability of unfastening of the bottom of sleeve with the use of zippers, the bottom and back of jacket were expanded, shelf suit narrowed, the lower part of the backrest was insulated; at the bottom of the sleeves were used wear resistant linings. Also were defined convenient locations of the pockets in jacket and sports trousers. The construction of trousers has no seating line, special folds was used in the knee area. It was defined the basic requirements for materials for manufacture of sport suit, hierarchical structure of material quality indicators for a sports suit was built.