Activity Report

What is an elderly experience kit?

An elderly experience kit is a tool which we can experience kinds of situation which elderly person are feeling in normal lives. The image below shows what is in this kit.
It is mainly used in educational fronts like schools, and this time we borrowed this kit it from our home economics teacher. In our school, the third grader students experience this kit. In addition, there are places where public institutions such as the local governments that may loan these kind of kits. Our school is located in Fujisawa city, and a group called the Fujisawa city social welfare meeting is loaning it out in the citizens in Fujisawa city and schools or groups which locates in the city.

We put on all appliances except the rubber gloves. We substituted earplugs into headphones-shaped ear defenses.

The experience

These are pictures of us experiencing elders, and introductions of what we had felt.

This is one of our members equipping the kit.

When having these cataract googles, it was difficult to see things, and we had to see things in a very close distance. Like the sign that says “生徒立入禁止” ? meaning “No entry for students”, the letters are pale so we knew that these letters are difficult to see for elders.	We can say the same thing to the signs in the elevators. The buttons are printed pale, so we had to read in a close distance. Also, “開”and”閉” ? meaning open and close, these kanji characters are very similar so it was especially hard to tell apart. In addition, we thought that we should use pictograms more to recognize more intuitively.

This is the maximum angle to bend our knee. We knew that it is difficult to sit straight. It is necessary to have a chair even in Japanese-style rooms.	This is the maximum angle to bend our knee.

We experienced pregnancy simulation using Judo wear and 7kg of rice. It was hard to face down and move around.	We also experienced a simple Cataract simulation.

This is how the website looks if you were Cataract. The left one is middle font size, the right is big size.

Conclusions and what we felt

We had experience lots of things that we had not knew before experiencing the elders’ body. It was very tiring for an elder to be in our school. We want to utilize this experiences and what we had learnt.
Also, what we just wrote, public institutions such as the local governments that may loan these kind of kits so we would like to suggest everyone to have this experience.