Longitudinal Changes in Everyday Life After Home Modifications for People Aging with Disabilities

Objective: To investigate longitudinal impacts of home modifications on the difficulty of performing everyday life tasks for people aging with disabilities, and to investigate whether other factors had any additional impacts on difficulty in everyday life tasks for people receiving home modifications.

Methods: The sample consisted of 103 persons aging with disabilities and in need of home modifications, divided into an intervention group and a comparison group. The data were first subjected to Rasch analysis and a random coefficient model was used.

Results: Participants in the intervention group reported a significantly lower level of difficulty in everyday life tasks compared with those in the comparison group. One confounding factor, number of months waiting for home modification, had an impact on difficulty in everyday life.

Conclusion: Home modifications are effective in decreasing difficulty in performing everyday life tasks up to six months after the installation. Furthermore, to be effective home modifications need to be installed in a timely fashion. For each consecutive month the person waited for their home modification the difficulty of performing everyday life tasks increased. Therefore, it is important that home modifications be installed as soon as possible after the need has been identified.