Technical assistance for severely motor- and multiple impaired children

Up from a certain degree of impairment motorand multiple disabled children rarely are able to use conventional environmental control and augmentative communication systems. To attain this ability, in many cases customer tailored user-interfaces plus a long-time training process is necessary. Even learning the relation between reason and effect and experiencing self-effectiveness (being able to make something happen in the environment) is the first big challenge and often an entire new experience. Hence, a technical system capable to meet the needs of these users has to fulfill three criteria: (1) give optimal support to the training-process; (2) support the facilitators with a tool to easily adapt the system to the rapidly changing user needs; (3) be capable to grow from first experiencing self-effectiveness up to a multi-functional multi-purpose technical aid. The paper discusses an innovative technical assistance system developed at the Vienna University of Technology which especially has regard to multiple impairments and the trainingprocess. Presently the authors look back on one and a half years of practical evaluation of the technical assistance system in a support center for motorand multiple impaired persons. After introducing the concept of the technical assistance system and pointing out its special features two case-studies illustrate the practical application of the system.