At one table, a vendor dropped a walking cane and it sprang back into his hand. At another, cat-food bowls sported two-foot rods with colored tips — all aiming to help make senior citizen’s lives easier.
The City of Evanston held its first ever Adaptive Device Expo Saturday at the Levy Senior Center, 300 Dodge Ave. The event featured items from about 40 vendors meant to improve the lives and safety of senior citizens and disabled people.
“This actually came out of a discussion at our long-term care committee in which one of our members felt seniors didn’t know about adaptive devices,” said Nancy Flowers, ombudsman of the city’s Commission on Aging, the group responsible for the event. “It really got us talking about this partnership between person and device. It enables you to be independent, the master of your own environment rather than the other way around, and that’s so important.”
Commission member Eric Parker said the event was “on pace” to host about 100 potential buyers by the end of the day.
Skokie resident Verlaine Riek, 75, said she didn’t need any of the devices for herself, but she learned about options for members of her church. She also said she might need some of the devices if her health started to fail.
“You begin to realize that things don’t work as well as they used to,” Riek said. “You know it’s going to get worse; you’ve got to be prepared.”
One of the more esoteric devices for sale was a set of pet-food bowls with large white poles on top, created so animal-lovers unable to bend down could still care for cats or dogs.
“We had always adopted homeless pets,” said Marsha Peters, who started the pet-care device company with her husband after she had about 10 surgeries for degenerative arthritis. “But when you get sick or disabled your life starts really shrinking, and you really have to think about things that are close to you. For many of us, that’s our pets.”
Peters’ company sells its products online and has customers in New York and Florida.
“We’ve been in business two months, and (sales) are kind of snowballing,” she said. “It’s just one of these things where you’re like, why hasn’t this been thought of before?”
Bob Nudd, of Peru Industries Inc., attended the fair to sell voice-activated lights and self-righting canes with rounded, weighted bottoms. He would have preferred to see more buyers at the fair, he said, but the expo was a good idea.
“A little more traffic would be great, but there’s a very high level of interest and that’s what we’re after,” he said.
The Commission on Aging also runs a program where seniors can receive some safety devices like bathtub benches or bathtub grab-rails for free. Although Medicare — the national insurance program for seniors — pays for larger items, bathroom safety items and their installation can still cost between $50 to $150 and are not covered by Medicare.
Alisa Dean, the representative for the program at Saturday’s fair, said seniors seemed to know about the program from talking with doctors and from advertisements in the Levy Center. Still, she said not as many seniors used the free devices as would be eligible.
“A lot of them still don’t want to use the care,” she said. “They don’t feel like they have to.”
Reach Lee S. Ettleman at [email protected].
