Assistive Technology Essay

The use of assistive technologies has become an important rehabilitation strategy to support functioning in adults and children with physical impairments and their participation in everyday life. [6] Adults who suffer from motor impairments due to severe brain damages, may lose their mobility, coordination, leisure skills, and vocational skills. In order to address these issues, many technologies designed to support and help physically impaired individuals to achieve their mobility and restore their independency and inclusion in society.[7] One of the major developments in rehabilitation industry is the creation of robot controllers. “Handy 1 automated eating aid”, is an example of one type of control robots which designed to help

Also, people with ALS often lose motor ability that is required for speech. To address this issue, a customized assistive technologies such as eye gaze communication boards developed that enhance the communication in this population via an optic microprocessors that can become activated by minimal movements of the person. [9] Furthermore, use of assistive technologies tailored for students with motor impairments in educational settings result an increase of students` academic success, potentially obtaining higher levels of educations as well as having higher rates of their employments in future. As an example, Speech recognition systems are valuable to students with motor impairments. These systems typically involve a desktop computer or laptop with a soundboard, microphone, and specialized software which enables a user to operate a computer with voice commands, eliminating the need for the fine motor movement for typing and reducing reliance on spelling and reading.

To solve these communication difficulties, a fascinating technology capable of reading disabled peoples` mind have been recently developed that help person with speech difficulties to let others know his/her needs and feelings without speaking. This system monitors person feeling, thoughts and imagination by MRI mechanism and then signals those particular cognitive and emotional states on the computer display. Moreover, for children with communication disorders, assistive technology can be used to enable them to have more intelligible speech or functional communication through non-speech modalities. [11] For example, SGDs are the most commonly used assistive technology for children. In order to teach children how to make a request, photographic symbols of preferred items can be attached to an SGD, that then a basic touch on the chosen photograph produces the corresponding request as a speech output. [12] These systems are often highly portable, and since electronic speech is produced, communication attempts may be more easily understood by most communication partners. [13] Thus, we can conclude that all these communication systems increases people with speech and communication difficulties to easily communicate their wants and needs, voice their choices and decisions, and have a