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Effectiveness of the Easy-Up Handle in acute rehabilitation

Student Health Services, University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA

Richard W Bohannon

Department of Physical Therapy, School of Allied Health, University of Connecticut, Storrs; Physical Therapy Consultants, West Hartford, CT, USA

Objective: The ability to attain standing without assistance is important to independent functioning. The objectives of this study, therefore, were to: (1) determine the effectiveness of the Easy-Up Handle for enabling otherwise dependent patients to attain standing from an armless chair and (2) establish whether knee extension force played a role in such effectiveness.

Design: Cross-sectional descriptive study and explicatory experiment.

Setting: Acute rehabilitation unit.

Subjects: A subset (n = 26) of 107 primarily elderly patients described in a previous study. The subjects were selected because of their inability to stand from an armless chair, even when using their upper limbs.

Main measures: The ability to stand from the same chair when using an Easy-Up Handle. Hand-held dynamometer measures of the combined strength of the lower extremities.

Results: Eight of 26 otherwise dependent patients were able to stand up independently with the Easy-Up Handle. Whether or not they were able to attain standing with the Easy-Up Handle was predicted by their combined knee extension force and by their combined force normalized against body weight. The Pearson correlations between stand-up independence (yes, no) and the forces were 0.496 and 0.543, respectively.

Conclusions: The Easy-Up Handle can facilitate independence in chair rise for some patients otherwise unable to stand from sitting. Even with the Easy-Up Handle, however, a threshold of knee extension force is required.

Clinical Rehabilitation, Vol. 19, No. 4, 381-386 (2005)
DOI: 10.1191/0269215505cr794oa


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