Our lives change, but our home doesn't. If you're getting close to 65, or thinking about retirement, it's time to talk about aging in place: steps we can take to maintain our quality of life during our senior years. National aging-in-place expert Dr. Jill Bjerke of Silver Spaces LLC joins Suzanne to talk about the Silver Spaces App, which helps you survey your home to make it more aging-in-place friendly.
Dr. Bjerke says, "There are dangerous situations, but because these things have been around us for so long, we just don't recognize that they could be a danger to our health: trips and falls. Trips and falls are the major cause of deaths for people over 65. With a hip fracture, you will usually not live independently, and most will have to go to a nursing home. These are preventable, and that was the reason this assessment was created.
"It's called SilverSpaces.com. It allows you to walk through your home, each room at a time, and answer questions about that room as it pertains to the way you use it. So it will say, do you have floor rugs? You should not have floor rugs. So the recommendation will be, either tape them down, or remove them. You have three sources of light. Do you have a task source, a natural source, or an ambient above-light source? We need a lot of sources of light, as our eyes change, and we just don't realize it. Do we have motion detector lights throughout our home? So that as we move through our home, particularly during dusk or during the dark, our ways are lighted.
If we have arthritis in our shoulder, can we reach up to that second shelf in our kitchen, or do we need to put in shelves that come down to us. Are we having back troubles and we can't bend over very well? Then we need drawers that pull all the way out to us.
"If you have sharp corners on your countertops in your kitchen, or your bathroom, and you fall, that's a perfect way to get a traumatic brain injury. There are rubber things you can put over those countertops. There are all kinds of solutions that are not real, real expensive that can change that environment."
"Another one that people don't realize over time, and I know this sounds silly but having gone through knee replacement surgery myself, I can attest to this: How high is your toilet? Is it hard to get up and down off of? Because it's too low, or do you have grab bars, and are they in the right place? So this assessment goes through both the interior and the exterior. It goes through second bedroom, second bathrooms, offices, dens. You can do as much or as little as you want, and what you are trying to assess.
"And then, at the end, you get a report that can either be printed or saved as a PDF. And it gives you very, very targeted recommendations and changes that you can make to make that problem easier to live with, and maybe even go away and do it in a different direction.
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