earticle

영어

The aging population increases rapidly in the modern society thanks to the development of medical technologies and improved quality of life. It is an important social matter and the senior welfare should be improved for the disease control, health maintenance and improvement and improvement of quality of life of the elderly. The research was conducted to prove the influence of the foot reflex massage on blood circulation and sleep of the elderly and to identify whether it could be utilized to improve senior’s blood circulation and sleep quality. 10 seniors age of 70 and more who were considered to have poor quality of sleep in Daejeon participated in the experiment. Total 10 sessions of foot reflex massage was administered from November 7 to 28, 2011 and each session last for 30 minutes. The SPSS 18 Statistical Program was used and frequency analysis was employed for general features. The differences before and after the foot reflex massage was analyzed by Wilcoxon signed-rank test, Friedman test and T-test. As a normality test of the questionnaire, Kolmogo rov-smirnava test was used and each difference shown while administering the Friedman test was re-tested by Wilcoxon test. The result shows that the massage has influence on senior’s sleeping habit, awakening and sleep regularity. Such a result identifies that the foot reflex massage has an influence on the improvement senior’s blood circulation and quality of sleep. However, the subject group was not big enough to get research result about diseases. It is expected to have more researches on senior’s psychological disorders, chronic diseases in connection with the foot reflex massage.