SALISBURY — A Salisbury-based company wants to shed a light on an overlooked aspect of occupational therapy, home livability.
Home for Life Design, a company that provides home safety metrics, is touting their Home for Life Design Accessibility Ratings, a proprietary system for gauging how safe a home is for elderly or infirmed patients.
“American healthcare is increasingly relocating into the home, yet fewer than 4 percent of U.S. homes provide the basic accessibility features of a no-step entry, single-floor living and wide halls and doorways, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies,” reads information from Home for Life Design.
The accessibility ratings seek to remedy this by grading individual homes based on their safety and accessibility.
“They are a measure that professionals use while they are working with someone in the home,” said Home for Life Design Founder and CEO Carolyn Sithong. “What they do is you can see how the person does different activities in their home…and as that person is demonstrating the different tasks that occur in those different rooms we provide accessibility ratings to determine whether or not the environment is supportive.”
The accessibility ratings quantify the conditions in a subject’s house and assign a score based on both the person’s physical abilities and the ease of which they are able to navigate their space.
“Home is a social determinant of health but they never had a way to measure it until today,” Sithong said. As healthcare moves more and more into the home, having a diagnostic tool for the home itself is really important for insurance agencies to know
The score is based off percentages. The higher the percentage the more accommodating a space, with 100 percent being the best.
“It’s a personal measure,” Sithong said, adding that no two living spaces are the same. “If you think about how someone may…have different things in their bathroom, different layouts, different physical layouts of their bathroom and they may or may not have access to a shower or a walk-in.”
Sithong referred to the concept as unique and added that the work she put into it was based on her experience.
“I’ve been an occupational therapist…for 25 years,” Sithong said. “The idea came from when I would be working with clients in the hospital.”
Sithong said that even the most comprehensive physical therapy courses could be for nothing if a home isn’t optimized.
“Even though I can get them to walk a certain amount, if they went home and there were stairs there and all of a sudden the stairs are sort of a barrier to their function. And so I set out to create these rating to help people know what modifications need to be done in the home to help support people no matter what their ability level is on.
Sithong said that it wasn’t enough to just create an arbitrary rating system. She said she sought validity to the numbers.
“Every person who uses these ratings, the patients are getting the same experience and the organization is collecting the same type of data, so that they can be confident in showing improvements across programming.”
Sithong said accessibility ratings give people, particularly the elderly, choices. Instead of resigning to a communal space, they can instead opt to remain in their homes.
Sithong said she hopes to take the idea behind the accessibility ratings and establish a standardized rating system.
“Is your metric validated,” Sithong said. “Have you gone through that rigorous peer-reviewed research.”
Sithong said that she hopes the idea of a metric spreads. She said that if her or another accessibility rating were to become widespread, they would need support from organizations like Housing and Urban Development, among others.
