Daily Living Aids are a group of products categorised as helping with daily tasks around the home or garden. To some extent or other, we all probably use at least one or two daily living aids in our home, without even consciously knowing it. Even common items, like can openers, foot-stools and floor mops can be regarded as living aids, as they simply make tasks around the home that little bit easier. For those with slight, or even more pronounced mobility problems, daily living aids have evolved greatly over the last few years, to accommodate the varying needs that many people have, especially for the elderly or disabled.
Daily living aids can help to lift and reach, to grip awkward or hazardous items safely, to reassure and give balance and coordination, or simply to take a few minutes off a task that for whatever reason, you find onerous or difficult.
Although naturally, many daily living aids have a place in the kitchen as one of the most functional rooms in the home, their use has extended to virtually all parts of the home and garden, as manufacturers and inventors have sought to tackle the tasks and activities that cause the most common daily niggles or difficulties.
But aside from making things easier, daily living aids also help with confidence and self-esteem.
If you’ve suffered any kind of injury to shoulder, arm, wrist or hand, then you’ll know that during those periods when you couldn’t lift or bear weight, that it was extremely frustrating, (being defeated by a tight jar lid is no joke at the time)!
Amplify this over time, and the many everyday task that are no longer simple and painless, then it can have a real impact on your self-confidence and mood.
So daily living aids help in more ways than the obvious…
A few examples of common daily living aids?
The Booklift Bookholder is a great example of a daily living aid, fulfilling a useful purpose and making life easier. This handy device is an easel-style book holder that has nine different height adjustments available, which allows the user to read from any size book at a very wide range of viewing angles, making reading anywhere, easier and less of a hassle.
Great for recipe books in the kitchen, or for reading anywhere else in the home for that matter.
For those with a weaker grip, which can happen for a wide variety of reasons, the Combination Kettle with Tipper really helps negate the difficulty of manoeuvring a heavy kettle and improves greatly on the safety aspect of dealing with potentially boiling water.
This power-assisted tipper (PowerPour Technology) does all the hard work for you, completely taking the strain so you just need to push the handle gently, and the kettle and pourer does all the rest, safely and quickly.
The Kettle’s non-weight bearing tilt and pour action from the ergonomic handle helps to direct hot water into your cup without the need for removing the kettle from its cradle.
The weighted base of the Uccello Kettle, then easily swivels on a rotating axis to help you pour hot water safely and steadily.
Sometimes, daily living aids help with the most seemingly innocuous tasks in the home, an example of such an aid comes in the form of the Crosshead Tap Turners.
These simple, yet highly effective tools help greatly in turning crosshead taps, as are found in many homes in the UK and beyond.
Sometimes these taps can be left too tight, or just be difficult to turn in general due to how they’ve been plumbed in. The Crosshead Tap Turners help with leverage and come colour coded so it’s easy to know which is for the hot or the cold tap.
If you have older relatives who tend to struggle with these particular taps in their home, it’s a very welcome and thoughtful gift they will appreciate.
These tap turners are ideal if the user has a compromised grip, in general, or temporarily due to injury or illness, they come as a pair and are extremely easy to fit over the tap and with easy leverage requiring only gentle pressure to turn.
Just like with tight taps in the home, jar and bottle tops can also become a daily frustration as manufacturers fit them so tightly, so that even those with the very strongest grip can find them a struggle to release.
The Universal Jar and Bottle Opener is a very handy addition to any kitchen, as it makes removing tight jar and bottle caps much easier.
This tool ensures a firm grip as it has a shaped rubber trim along the inside edges. For hand comfort when holding, it features a comfortable grooved outer edge for you to hold, squeeze and twist more easily.
For compatibility with as many sizes as possible, the Universal Jar and Bottle Opener has four sizes of circular sections, therefore it will accommodate virtually all jars and lids you will encounter in the kitchen.
So there’s a roundup of a few examples of daily living aids, if you’d like to check out a much wider range then you can go to our main category page here where you’ll se a much bigger selection and some great ideas and innovations.
Phil Ashforth is a staff writer for Mobility Smart, an online retailer of health, wellbeing and mobility equipment to help you recover from injury, recuperation and protection of joints and muscles when exercising or just helping you in normal daily life, you’ll find their website here
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