Prediction of elderly seating comfort from physical condition, chair type and gender

Many persons over 60 years of age have unique problems sitting on chairs. These problems which are caused by decreased mobility, strength or disease suggest that the chairs should be selected carefully with some scientific basis that incorporates the varying demands of the elderly community. Identification of the proper chair for a particular individual, especially if it has to be low cost and nonmotorized, is a difficult job for institutions, elderly themselves, their families and the furniture industry. Keeping in view these problems a prediction model is developed using established statistical methods to predict comfort of sitting of a particular individual sitting in a particular chair. The study is based on experimental data collected on 18 male and female subjects over the age of 64. The equation uses chair type, body fat %, i.e. above average fat etc., body size, i.e. lean etc., and gender as inputs. The equation was tested on new female and male elderly subjects sitting on two new chairs. The model holds out excellent on the validation despite a low coefficient of determination value obtained for the equation. The paper not only presents a comfort prediction model but also shows a new direction for elderly seating research by employing statistical methods and elderly variables which do not appear in the published literature on elderly seating in the manner presented in this paper. This model will have wide applications especially for practioners (e.g., human factors engineers, occupational therapists, product developers) who need such information in a hurry. This approach also has heuristic value for the researcher in providing guidelines for the testing of other critical variables that may impact on the use of a chair or of other pieces of equipment.