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“Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”- Will Smith

Friday 27 April 2012

Tutorial Eight: Assistive Technology

Assistive Technology was defined as ‘technology-related assistance’ and has been incorporated into numbers of disability acts around the world that may refer from a lower-tech like mobility aids such as walkers to high-technology devices like speech synthesizers (Srinivasan &Lloyd, 2011).

Assistive technology is “any item, piece of equipment or product system whether acquired commercially of the shelf, modified, or customized that is used to increase or improve functional capabilitites of individuals with disabilities.” (Cook & Hussey, 2000, p. 5)

The way I interpret assistive technology it basically ‘assists’ or helps someone who have difficulty performing a task whether a daily living or leisure. Assistive technology allows an impaired individual to improve his/her level of participation in his/her desired occupation.

Trev from Star mobility Hamilton went into our class this afternoon and brought a lot of possible assistive technologies. One thing that struck me was the switches, particularly the jelly bean switches. His switches come with various colours mainly red, green, yellow and blue. This particular switch has the dimension of 63mm (2.5”) x 18mm (0.7”) and costs $135NZD.

The button can take up to 75g of force and durability is guaranteed. The switch can connect to various things from toys to laptops it allows  someone with impaired fine hand movements to simply ‘tap’ the button with either whole palm or any side of the hand.

Here I provided two links from the web that shows how these switches can be used.  Link 1 and link 2.


References:



Srinivasan, S., & Lloyd L. (2003). Assistive Technology for mobility, seating, and positioning. In O. Wendt, R., Quist, & L., Lloyd.  Assistive Technology:  Principles and applications for Communication Disorders and Special Education. (p. 413). UK: Emerald. 


Disclaimer: this blog post has no intention to advertise or support a bussiness.

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