• Journal of The Korea Institute of Healthcare Architecture
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.65-75
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• 2010

This is a comparative study mainly on foreign countries' domestic standards and laws on barrier free housing construction that can be applied to the dwelling of elderly friendly apartment housing. Eight countries - the United States, Germany, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and China - were reviewed as foreign cases. The analyzed subjects were design standards only for the disabled and the aged. To compare barrier-free guides of the eight countries, each barrier-free guide on three space units (entrance, bedroom, living room) was divided into 11 design items and 36 design factors. The comparative analysis on foreign cases was based on the design guide according to Korea's KS P 1509 (principle and recommendation for designing dimension of dwelling in consideration of the elderly). Some factors -if with dimensions- were compared by means of the skewness of distribution. In the analysis result, there were not only common standards for the nine countries such as a dimension of the space for wheelchair movement but also different standards such as heights of outlets and horizontal lengths of bathtub grab bars. The detailed analysis shows that it is urgently necessary to prepare new domestic national design standards for 8 factors that foreign countries already have. It is also needed to immediately prepare dimension standards for the design factors, which have no detailed dimensions but only national guides, in consideration for anthropometric dimension.