As modern society becomes increasingly more elderly, developing specialized equipment to assist this growing population in everyday tasks becomes more and more important. Here we have developed a passive gravity balanced arm support system. It was designed to assist the arm motion of elderly people with disabilities. The system consists of the joints and the link and the gas springs. This is a ...

Although many long-term care (LTC) programs assume that the disabilities of their frail elderly participants are stable in nature, there has been suggestive evidence to the contrary. This study tests stability of disability among social/health maintenance organization (S/HMO) members who were judged eligible for admission into a nursing home. Identified persons were reassessed quarterly. By the...

Ambient Intelligence (AmI) characterizes a vision where humans are surrounded by computers. Combining ongoing technological developments (e.g. pervasive computing, wearable devices, sensor networks etc.) with user-centred design methods greatly increases the acceptance of the intelligent system and makes it more capable of providing a better quality of life in a non-intrusive way. Elderly peopl...

The article presents part of the research carried out within a project aimed at procuring interaction of people with disabilities and elderly with their environment through the use of information and communication technologies. We present methodological aspects related to participation models, user experience, technology acceptance and peer training. Technology was designed to test the effectiv...

People with disabilities and the elderly face difficulties to fulfill their accessibility needs in daily life routines, mainly when they have an emergency demanding speedy specific assistance. This article proposes SafeFollowing, a collaborative model help people smart assistive cities. The main contribution of this work is specification decentralized ubiquitous accessibility, which involves pu...

Since 2013 we built a working group formed by researchers, educators, social workers, communicators and educational psychologists to bring archaeological research all types of audiences, especially those with limited access scientific dissemination programmes. In particular, refer people psychological disorders or physical disabilities, older adults, newcomers, groups traditionally marginalized...

Elderly adults face two serious challenges bridging the digital divide. First, many suffer from physical or cognitive disabilities, which inhibit computer use. Second, the “traditional” personal computer interface constitutes a foreign and forbidding paradigm. Consequently, elderly adults are less likely to access the Internet, and this lack of accessibility denies them increased social contact...