Edited Transcript Universal Design Conference Sydney Town Hall - PDF document

Edited Transcript by Jane Bringolf 2012 National Disability Award winner COTA NSW Edited Transcript Universal Design Conference Sydney Town Hall (Lower) Wednesday, 20 August 2014 at 9am Day 1 About This Document This edited transcript has been taken directly from the text of live captioning provided by The Captioning Studio and, as such, it may contain errors. The Captioning Studio accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from the draft transcript provided for this edited version. COTA NSW accepts no liability for any event or action resulting from this edited transcript provided for the benefit of conference delegates. Only those presentations made in the Lower Town Hall are provided. There was no captioning available for the concurrent sessions held in an upstairs room. The original draft transcript must not be published without The Captioning Studio’s written permission. Page 1

Edited Transcript by Jane Bringolf 2012 National Disability Award winner COTA NSW INCLUSIVE PRACTICE Concurrent Session One: Chair Nicholas Loder Richard Bowman: Slip resistance according to Goldilocks Synopsis: Richard outlines the issues associated with gauging slip resistance and says that trips and falls are not necessarily associated with slips, or slips on slippery surfaces. There are many factors to consider in preventing trips and falls and not all of these can be captured in an industry standard. Cleaning materials and wear and tear over time all contribute to the complexity. Getting slip resistance just right is not as easy as it looks because the qualities of slip resistance change over time as the surface wears and generally it is measured when the product is new. And fall prevention is much more than providing a slip-resistant surface. In Europe the construction product requirements now state that floors must be safe or slip resistant at the end of an economically reasonable working life. A simple statement. Why not put that in your specifications? It's an inconvenient truth that slip resistance decreases as time passes. We've got test methods, and this is one developed at CSIRO. It's very simple. It doesn't take too long to do. This is a test method that can be used on resilient materials. In the Standards meetings representatives say we don't have anything, but they do have standards and it's just a matter of applying them. In handbook 198 that was published earlier this year, we have some revised guidance in table 3B. There are some aspects that I think are very good. We've changed the classifications were V W X Y Z, to P5 down to P0. The P1 recommendation for dry areas excludes a lot of polished stones and other materials traditionally used in those areas and there are several aspects of this handbook that need to be revisited, but that is the guide that you should be using at the moment. It doesn't have some of the material that's in handbook 197, which is meant to be being rewritten at the moment. So you need to go there if you want to use the recommendations. But in that handbook there is no guidance for domestic residential situations, so that's unfortunate. In some projects, the slip resistance has been compromised within a week of installation. If you think of a green Scotch Pad that we use for washing dishes, that is what is used in the accelerated test method and that can take the figure down by 15 BPN units in some materials just a 30-second light rub. A lot of the materials we're using don't have a lot of slip resistance. They may appear so initially, but they don't. What we basically need to be doing, I believe, is to be identifying a level at the end of an economically reasonable service life, a maintenance level where you might want to use some form of treatment. So floors should be not too slip resistant when new. The traditional way has been to say we need a factor of safety. Let's increase the requirement for slip resistance. Then you can't clean the floor. In a commercial situation, people are going to get aggressive cleaning machines with pads on and that's going to remove the slip resistance, so you've totally compromised the procedure at the outset and you end up with something that is no longer slip resistant. And we need sufficient slip resistance at the end of the Page 2

Edited Transcript by Jane Bringolf 2012 National Disability Award winner COTA NSW working life. But how much traction is required? If a floor surface has greater available traction than a pedestrian demands, it should be safe. It's a very simple equation. However, we determine human traction demands on force plates in laboratories and we measured the availability of flooring traction using competing test methods. These results may not be replicated in real situations. So you can maintain the floor, clean it in different way, different experts get different results. It's not reported accordingly. So there is a lot of ambiguity at times in the results that you might get when you commission them. Testing with three speeds of walking - young people, middle-aged people, senior people, male, female. There is not a lot of difference. So as we age, our traction demand really doesn't change that much. It's often stated what is the limit for slip resistance? It's a nonsense to try to abstract things to a single figure because when we're walking on a known slippery surface, we lower our traction demand. When we're walking in an unconstrained manner, we have a higher traction demand, when we're pushing a load, we require more traction from the floor. So what traction we need from the floor depends on our activity and how we approach it and what we know about it. We don't suddenly find that at point 4 it's safe, point 39 it's dangerous, there will always be a continuum spectrum and it will be highly dependent on the shoes we're wearing, the nature of the contaminant, when the floor was last cleaned, all manner of things. So it's not a simple issue. So what is adequately slip resistant? We don't have any benchmarking data. For all of the work that we do, who can tell me what the slip resistance of this floor is anywhere in this building? Nobody would know. This is true of the general environment. One of the projects I'd like to tell you about is our use of virtual reality environments in gait biomechanics experiments to determine the required slip resistance of flooring materials. When people are walking in laboratories on plates, they're told to walk in an unconstrained manner, walk freely, and as they walk that gives an indication of their traction demand. If we tell them to walk cautiously, they'll walk in all manner of different ways: How dangerous is it? How safely do I walk? So you can't ask people to do that. If we put people into a virtual reality environment, we can control what they're seeing and we can control their response. So we can understand far better how people might approach a room that they've never walked into before, whether it's a residential bathroom, public toilets, or if it's an office building, walking out from the lift into a lobby and it's raining outside, or if it's bright light outside or it's dark outside, you can change anything you want. In the virtual reality environment I can have rats appearing through the floor, I can have fire coming out - anything. So we can produce all manner of environments. We can change the lighting, and we can use the Vicon system where we mark people and we can determine where the centre of gravity is and things like that. This will be done on a treadmill where we have a couple of force plates and for some of the work we can do this in an omni walking situation where you're far freer to change direction. Are the Australian regulations sound? No. The whole of our building code is built on clichés and innuendo rather than fact. Basically a study of the Australian Building Code commissioned by Monash University Accident Research Centre, there was absolutely no quantification of slip resistance, no relationship between slip occurrence and a magnitude of slip resistance and, as I said before, there is no benchmarking of the level of slip resistance within our environment. So how do we know when somebody falls over Page 3