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Community Challenge #2: Interactive Accessible Home05.28.08 |
Project Name: Interactive Accessible Home (Click to Read Original Proposal)
Description
Imagine for a moment, suddenly being unable to hear the knock at your front door, or stand and walk to the kitchen in the middle night, reach the faucet on your sink to wash your hands, reach and open a window to let in the fresh air. Imagine yourself confined to a wheelchair trying to navigate the doorways in your home, the threshold in your shower, or perform simple every day tasks such as chopping vegetables on a counter that is too for you to reach.
In the United States alone, there are an estimated 54 million people with some form of disability and 48% of this group is classified as severely disabled. An estimated 1.8 million people in the United States use a wheelchair, and 5.2 million people have used a cane, crutches, or a walker for longer than 6 months. The number of with some form of disability has been steadily and dramatically increasing for the past 20 years and as America grays, it is expected to continue to rise.
For people with mobility impairments, the simplest daily living tasks become a challenge at best and impossible at worst.
Homes can be designed or remodeled to accommodate the needs of persons with mobility impairments, but those needs can very significantly from person to person and the expense of remodeling a home to provide accessibility can be daunting. Persons with mobility impairments face still more challenges, when considering such modifications to their homes. As a person without disability, I can easily go to the local home improvement store, view kitchen counter configurations, walk into a shower stall and see how it feels, try out the latest appliances. However, for a person with mobility impairment, transportation alone may be physically, emotionally, and financially challenging or even impossible.
Our project would construct an interactive home, in the Virtual World of Second Life, that would allow a person with a mobility impairment to navigate through it using a wheelchair or walker. Or, for example, in an avatar that is less than average height, without limbs, to physically try out different construction elements such as; variable counter top heights, window designs, door and threshold widths and heights. They could manipulate various design configurations, elements, furnishings, and appliances to learn what suits their unique needs, before making expensive decisions about such things in the physical world.
What is the scope of your endeavor and what would you most like to accomplish?
The immediate short-term scope of this project is to provide a tool that persons with mobility impairment can easily and cost effectively access to explore ways in which they can improve accessibility in their homes and thus the quality of their daily lives. However, the long-term scope of this project has an even greater potential. The project has the potential to become a self-sustained resource center where people with disabilities could easily access information and publications on living with a disability, remodeling a home to accommodate their disability, products and services that are available to assist them. Corporate sponsors and equipment manufactures will be sought to sustain the project past the grant period and allow it to grow as a resource center.