Search results for "Assistive technology"
showing 8 items of 18 documents
Family caregivers’ involvement in caring for frail older family members using welfare technology: a qualitative study of home care in transition
2022
Abstract Background Demographic, economic and organisational changes challenge home care services. Increased use of welfare technology and involvement of family members as co-producers of care are political initiatives to meet these challenges. However, these initiatives also involve ethical aspects. Method The aim of this qualitative study was to explore family caregivers’ experience of involvement and possible ethical aspects of caring for frail older family members receiving home care services supported by welfare technology. This study used a qualitative explorative and descriptive design within a phenomenological-hermeneutical approach. Sixteen interviews with eighteen family caregiver…
An Electrooculography based Human Machine Interface for wheelchair control
2019
International audience; This paper presents a novel single channel Electrooculography (EOG) based efficient Human–Machine Interface (HMI) for helping the individuals suffering from severe paralysis or motor degenerative diseases to regain mobility. In this study, we propose a robust system that generates control command using only one type of asynchronous eye activity (voluntary eye blink) to navigate the wheelchair without a need of graphical user interface. This work demonstrates a simple but robust and effective multi-level threshold strategy to generate control commands from multiple features associated with the single, double and triple voluntary eye blinks to control predefined action…
Emotion Elicitation Oriented to the Development of a Human Emotion Management System for People with Intellectual Disabilities
2010
The integration of people with intellectual disabilities into working and social environments is one of the main issues in applying Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into Assistive Technology field. In order to solve this problem, the use of Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs) is a fact among the attendance community. Human Emotion Management System (HEMS) enhances the performance of ITSs. In this work a HEMS is included in a new ITS system (LAGUNTXO) which adds user affective information. People with intellectual disabilities and elderly need physical and intellectual support. This may be achieved by a HEMS which attempts to solve critical situations, like those presented in b…
A Mobile Application Concept to Encourage Independent Mobility for Blind and Visually Impaired Students
2012
This paper presents a user-centric application development process for mobile application to blind and visually impaired students. The development process connects the assistive technology experts, teachers and students from the school for visually impaired together to participate to the design of the mobile application. The data for the analysis is gathered from interviews and workshops with the target group. The main goal of the project is to examine how mobile application can be used to encourage and motivate visually impaired students to move independently indoors and outdoors. The application allows the students to interact with their environment through use of sensor technology now st…
Hearing-impaired pupils in mainstream education in Finland: teachers’ experiences of inclusion and support
2017
Today, in Finland, the majority of hearing-impaired pupils attend regular schools. This is in line with inclusive policy. This study aims to investigate do these pupils receive support from teacher ...
Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank: Advances in Optogenetics, Ethical Issues Affecting DBS Research, Neuromodulatory …
2021
We estimate that 208,000 deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices have been implanted to address neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders worldwide. DBS Think Tank presenters pooled data and determined that DBS expanded in its scope and has been applied to multiple brain disorders in an effort to modulate neural circuitry. The DBS Think Tank was founded in 2012 providing a space where clinicians, engineers, researchers from industry and academia discuss current and emerging DBS technologies and logistical and ethical issues facing the field. The emphasis is on cutting edge research and collaboration aimed to advance the DBS field. The Eighth Annual DBS Think Tank was held virtually on Septem…
A Unified Theory of Psychophysical Laws in Auditory Intensity Perception.
2020
Psychophysical laws quantitatively relate perceptual magnitude to stimulus intensity. While most people have accepted Stevens's power function as the psychophysical law, few believe in Fechner's original idea using just-noticeable-differences (jnd) as a constant perceptual unit to educe psychophysical laws. Here I present a unified theory in hearing, starting with a general form of Zwislocki's loudness function (1965) to derive a general form of Brentano's law. I will arrive at a general form of the loudness-jnd relationship that unifies previous loudness-jnd theories. Specifically, the "slope," "proportional-jnd," and "equal-loudness, equal-jnd" theories, are three additive terms in the ne…
Assistive Technology and Affective Mediation
2006
The lack of attention towards affective communication in assistive technology and disability research can be potentially overcome thanks to the development of affective computing and affective mediation areas. This document describes the main impairments and disorders that may involve affective communication deficits. We also present several affective mediation technologies that are being applied or may be integrated in assistive technologies in order to improve affective communication for a range of disabilities. Finally, we describe our experience with Gestele, an application that incorporates multimodal elements of affective mediation for people with mobility impairments, as well as the …