Overcoming dressing difficulties

Most healthy people take mobility and the everyday tasks that they overcome without effort for granted. For most people, at least until they reach their later years, only jobs that require physical effort, strength or a special skill are deemed hard and challenging.

There is however an increasingly large section of all western societies where many of the day to day chores that able bodied people take in their stride are positively difficult. These tasks, chores and processes may not be physically demanding or require any great skill, but for someone who has trouble moving, lifting, bending or holding (with their hands), these activities may be very difficult.

Naturally walking and staying mobile, both in the home and outdoors, is an obvious example, however tasks like personal hygiene and even being able to dress and undress oneself can become a very demanding chore for older people and those with illnesses and conditions that reduce and restrict movement.

So what is available and what kind of aids and inventions can be used to help?

Mobility can be restored in some part by wheelchairs and mobility scooters and bath lifts, lifting toilets seats and the like can all help with personal hygiene. This still leaves the problem of putting on clothes.

There are however many clever and highly effective aids that can make getting dressed firstly, an independent and dignified process and, secondly, a much easier and less challenging one.

The aids that are available for dressing are quite extensive and they range from clever pocket sized tools that can button and unbutton a button hole, to frames that can be used to help pull pants up.

Some of these tools are multi purpose and can perform more than one task whilst other are task-specific.

There are also some clever alternatives to things like regular shoelaces that make wearing shoes easier. One example is coiled laces that can be pulled to a comfortable tightness before being released so that the “coil effect” of the laces hold the pre-set tightness without the need for a bow or knot.

Other dressing aids include dressing sticks that can be of great assistance when it comes to putting on a shirt or a jacket. These sticks have a hook or claw at one end and this makes it possible to pull part of a garment that would otherwise be out of reach.

Many clever aids and variations on aids are available for dressing and they even run to shoe removers and sock lifters – the feet quite naturally being one of the hardest parts of the body to reach and stretch to.

Although reduced mobility, resulting from any cause, can be traumatic and distressing, there are now more ways of regaining or extending mobility than ever before. New aids, tools and physical therapies are constantly coming to the fore and there are very few tasks or activities for which some kind of assistive device has yet to be designed.