Let me answer your previous question first, which was the one about the groups that the B.C. Network for Aging Research brings together. What we try to do is bring together health authorities with academics, the provincial government, and the private sector, as well as with consumers. We find that the seniors need to be involved in the research, both in drawing attention to what questions need to be answered to improve their quality of life, and also in the area of technology or environmental gerontology, where we most definitely want to user-test the products.
The users need to be consulted right from the beginning, through the prototype and through to the next stage, the development of the product, because there are closets full of assisted devices that people have bought. They use them once or twice and they find them too darned difficult, so they sit unused.
In the study we did for Fraser Health we tried out some grab bars that were available from a commercial outfit—they sit on either side of the toilet to enable people to steady themselves so that they can get on and off safely—and found that they were just too difficult to manipulate, except by the tallest and strongest of our sample of people.