A number of patents have been issued for harnesses for infants but very few for harnesses for adults. Adult patients, particularly elderly patients sometimes have only slight control over their bodily movements and, when seated in a chair, can slump over at the waist or even slide entirely off a chair possibly injuring themselves. In like manner such patients, when lying on a bed, can roll or slide off the bed with similar bad results. Thus there is a need for both a harness for a seated adult patient and a harness for an adult patient lying prone, but having separate harnesses each adapted for those entirely different positions of a patient is expensive, and even when a nursing facility is supplied with separate harnesses for prone or sitting patients, removing one type of harness for replacement by the other is difficult for the care-giver, and often traumatic for the patient. Hence there has been need for a universal harness which will serve a patient with equal facility whether he is sitting on a chair or lying down on a bed, and the broad object of the invention is to provide such a dual purpose harness especially adapted for use by adult patients.