Functional Textile Preferences of Elderly People

Aging is an inevitable stage of lifetime bringing along physical and emotional deterioration. Rate of aging population in the world has been constantly rising with the contribution of technological improvements on life quality, and medical services. Depending on the unavoidable physical and emotional changes of aging human body, clothing preferences and needs become different then needs of other textile and clothing consumer groups. Textile and clothing products are one of the basic needs of human kind. Sufficient and appropriate clothing is especially important for life quality improvement at elderly stage of human life. New generation functional and smart textile and clothing products bring new opportunities to improve life quality of elderly people with such wide range products of mobility support clothing, medical help, hygiene, and health monitoring textile and clothing products. This survey based research work is aimed to search the awareness level and priority of society about the functional and smart textile products for elderly people. It has been found that gender difference has significant influence on preference level of functional textile products, where women has higher interest then men about functional textiles. It can also be stated that comfort properties are primarily preferred preferences comparing to the fashion and functionality properties of textile products. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n2s5p27