Egressibility : Applying the concept of accessibility to the self-evacuation of people with functional limitations

Sammanfattning: The population is getting increasingly older, and old age is correlated with decreased functional capacity. In society, continuous improvements in accessibility of public environments is apparent. Together, these two factors contribute to the trend that the people that are expected to perform self-evacuation today are more diverse in abilities than ever. Functional capacity refers to the abilities to perform fundamental everyday activities such as seeing, hearing, moving around, etc., while a decrease in functional capacity is referred to as a functional limitation. In the field of accessibility, definitions have been developed to reflect the person-environment interactions that determine whether an environment is accessible or not. That is, accessibility can be investigated by assessing the interaction between the environmental demands and a person’s functional capacity. The focus of this thesis has been the concept of egressibility, here defined as “accessibility to means of evacuation”. The purpose has been to explore ways of identifying issues related to self-evacuation possibilities for people with functional limitations based on the notion of accessibility. This was achieved through two research studies including conceptual and methodological exploration on the topic. The first study was a qualitative interview study to investigate the perspectives on egressibility from older people with functional limitations in Sweden. The second study focused on a methodology implemented into an instrument to measure egressibility by juxtaposing environmental demands and functional limitations. The results from the qualitative study showed that older people may tend to favour self-reliance in mitigating egressibility issues, instead of relying on the physical and social environment to be supportive. The instrument developed in the second study, called the Egress Enabler, displayed promising attributes of validity and reliability during initial testing. However, the Egress Enabler is affected by the current lack of scientific knowledge regarding several aspects on the interaction between environmental demands and functional capacity during egress. Some of these knowledge gaps have already been identified and should be further investigated. The Egress Enabler represents a necessary step towards a comprehensive performance-based evaluation of self-evacuation possibilities for people with functional limitations, highlighting the complex interaction between evacuation and accessibility.