Welcome!
Welcome to this course on Adaptations for Everyday Tasks. I'm your host, Sarah Pruett. We've put together this course to help educate you about how different tasks in and around the home could be made easier with products or techniques. I'm glad you're here, and I hope you learn something new.
Hi, I'm Sarah, occupational therapist and program director at the Universal Design Project. I am really excited to share some great tips with you in this course.
A home is a place that we are able to call our own. It is our private escape that prepares us for the day come morning, and welcomes us back with open doors by night. It is one of the few places set up for use, especially by you. Every individual should have the right to access their own home with the least amount of trouble possible.
However, we all know life can throw us curve balls. Certain health conditions can hinder our ability to use our homes to the fullest extent, leaving people frustrated and wondering what the next steps can be. When the environment `doesn't work for your needs, it puts limitations on the things you need and want to do.
The good news is, the innovation of many in the field of occupational therapy, or OT, has produced great adaptive methods and strategies to promote engagement in life at home with as few barriers as possible. Even just knowing about products and tips to make your daily life easier and convenient is a big bonus, disability or not.
Do you ever get sucked into those videos on social media with unique products that makes life's everyday activities easier? Just me? Well, we OTs love to share that type of information with others, no matter the condition, whether you're old or young, tall or short, or if your disability is visible or invisible, adaptations can be made to ensure life can be lived barrier-free from the moment you arrive home to the second you close your eyes at night.
Most likely, the home you live in doesn't support your needs 100%. And because there are different ways to perform everyday occupations or tasks, our homes need to be flexible to support those different ways.
That's why the main objective of this course was for our team at the Universal Design Project, to compile a great resource with products, tips, and techniques that make all of those daily tasks easier. Some of these suggestions you may have heard about from a physical or occupational therapist, but others are just mainstream tools and technology that make our lives a little bit easier.
I do want to note that these are just suggestions. If you're working with a specific occupational therapist, you'll want to connect with them to ask about the specifics of your situation and how that relates to some of the ideas that I'm gonna share here.
Now, before we dive into each area of the home with helpful resources and links, I wanna clear up any confusion and tell you the difference between what I'm gonna talk about in this course, adapting the way we do things with products or techniques, compared to details about home modification and universal design that we elaborate on in several of our other courses.
While the suggestions we share in this course can be utilized in new homes or already existing ones, it's different than modifying a home. Home modifications for specific people's needs, like adding a ramp, switching out a vanity to create seated access underneath, or widening a doorway, we will talk about in our course called Modifications for Non-Accessible Homes.
These changes are made to already existing homes by actually switching out the things in the environment or doing renovations to fix non-accessible features and make them accessible. Sometimes they're as simple as adjusting some minor home elements. But they can also entail adding on an entirely new bedroom on the main floor, or renovating a bathroom for a walk-in or roll-in shower.
These changes are specifically for one family's needs, but could benefit others too. In an ideal world, we would apply universal design to the construction of a new home and consider how all of the features throughout the entire home could be designed to benefit anyone that lived or visited there. But sometimes that's just not feasible for many people to just leave their current living situation and build new. We talk about how to apply these UD concepts in our course Design Guidelines for Universally Accessible Homes.
It's easy to get these terms confused, so I wanted to make sure I addressed the differences a little bit. So whether you're an occupational therapist or another healthcare professional and you're learning more about different ways to adapt a home, an advocate for people with disabilities, or a person who has a disability yourself, I hope you will learn some new ways to approach tasks throughout the home and share what you've learned in this course with others.
For your convenience, we've separated the topics by room with helpful resources underneath so you can go back and reference things in the future as well. So, that is enough talk from me. Let's get started.
Hi, I'm Sarah, occupational therapist and program director at the Universal Design Project. I am really excited to share some great tips with you in this course.
A home is a place that we are able to call our own. It is our private escape that prepares us for the day come morning, and welcomes us back with open doors by night. It is one of the few places set up for use, especially by you. Every individual should have the right to access their own home with the least amount of trouble possible.
However, we all know life can throw us curve balls. Certain health conditions can hinder our ability to use our homes to the fullest extent, leaving people frustrated and wondering what the next steps can be. When the environment `doesn't work for your needs, it puts limitations on the things you need and want to do.
The good news is, the innovation of many in the field of occupational therapy, or OT, has produced great adaptive methods and strategies to promote engagement in life at home with as few barriers as possible. Even just knowing about products and tips to make your daily life easier and convenient is a big bonus, disability or not.
Do you ever get sucked into those videos on social media with unique products that makes life's everyday activities easier? Just me? Well, we OTs love to share that type of information with others, no matter the condition, whether you're old or young, tall or short, or if your disability is visible or invisible, adaptations can be made to ensure life can be lived barrier-free from the moment you arrive home to the second you close your eyes at night.
Most likely, the home you live in doesn't support your needs 100%. And because there are different ways to perform everyday occupations or tasks, our homes need to be flexible to support those different ways.
That's why the main objective of this course was for our team at the Universal Design Project, to compile a great resource with products, tips, and techniques that make all of those daily tasks easier. Some of these suggestions you may have heard about from a physical or occupational therapist, but others are just mainstream tools and technology that make our lives a little bit easier.
I do want to note that these are just suggestions. If you're working with a specific occupational therapist, you'll want to connect with them to ask about the specifics of your situation and how that relates to some of the ideas that I'm gonna share here.
Now, before we dive into each area of the home with helpful resources and links, I wanna clear up any confusion and tell you the difference between what I'm gonna talk about in this course, adapting the way we do things with products or techniques, compared to details about home modification and universal design that we elaborate on in several of our other courses.
While the suggestions we share in this course can be utilized in new homes or already existing ones, it's different than modifying a home. Home modifications for specific people's needs, like adding a ramp, switching out a vanity to create seated access underneath, or widening a doorway, we will talk about in our course called Modifications for Non-Accessible Homes.
These changes are made to already existing homes by actually switching out the things in the environment or doing renovations to fix non-accessible features and make them accessible. Sometimes they're as simple as adjusting some minor home elements. But they can also entail adding on an entirely new bedroom on the main floor, or renovating a bathroom for a walk-in or roll-in shower.
These changes are specifically for one family's needs, but could benefit others too. In an ideal world, we would apply universal design to the construction of a new home and consider how all of the features throughout the entire home could be designed to benefit anyone that lived or visited there. But sometimes that's just not feasible for many people to just leave their current living situation and build new. We talk about how to apply these UD concepts in our course Design Guidelines for Universally Accessible Homes.
It's easy to get these terms confused, so I wanted to make sure I addressed the differences a little bit. So whether you're an occupational therapist or another healthcare professional and you're learning more about different ways to adapt a home, an advocate for people with disabilities, or a person who has a disability yourself, I hope you will learn some new ways to approach tasks throughout the home and share what you've learned in this course with others.
For your convenience, we've separated the topics by room with helpful resources underneath so you can go back and reference things in the future as well. So, that is enough talk from me. Let's get started.