Nowadays, many research groups are actively working on assistive technologies for the elderly. Technologies for capturing and understanding physical activity are an important aspect of this research field. Most often, they employ accelerometers or cameras. Applications include both diagnosis as well as long term monitoring, in the natural home environment of the elderly, in the nursing home and...

Until recently children with very profound disabilities–children who cannot speak and can move only their eyes or head–could be made comfortable, but by and large could not be educated. Assistive technologies now enable them to communicate and to be educated alongside their non-disabled peers. This is a wonderful development. But what is the financial cost? In this paper we look in detail at th...

Institutions receiving federal funding for research from the U.S.Public Health Service need to have policies and procedures to both prevent research misconduct and to adjudicate it when it occurs. The person who is designated to handle research misconduct is typically referred to as the research integrity officer (RIO). In this interview study we report on 79 RIOs who describe how they would ha...

This paper addresses some critical aspects of the Rehabilitation (Assistive) Technology market in Europe which characterise innovation and determine its type and direction. It is argued that innovation in this field is restricted because of (i) the limited and inefficient interaction between the identified seven market elements; (ii) the structural characteristics and general economic environme...

It is argued that cognitive capacities can be understood as the outcome of the collective action of a set of agents created by tools that explore possible behaviours and train the agents to behave in such appropriate ways as may be discovered. The coherence of the whole system is assured by a combination of vetting the performance of new agents and dealing appropriately with any faults that the...

Children are often forced into mainstream schools while special needs schools are being shut down. Children with phonological disorders in mainstream schools go through fear, shame and frustration of not being understood or misunderstood. The proposed research attempts to address this issue by way of designing and developing a prototype for an assistive device that would help special needs chil...

Wearablesmayhavenotablepotentialasanassistivetechnologyforpersonswithvariousdifficulties. Althoughquitepopular,smartwatches’nichesarestillrevealing.Oneofthemisdefinitelyinthedomain ofassistivetechnologyduetotheircommunicationandlocationfeatures.Positioningfeaturesenable parentsorcaregiverstoknowthewhereaboutsofchildorpersonswithdisabilities...

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This article examines assumptions and beliefs underpinning research into educational technology. It critically reviews some approaches used to investigate the impact of technologies for teaching and learning. It focuses on comparative studies, performance comparisons and attitudinal studies to illustrate how under-examined assumptions lead to questionable findings. The extent to which it is pos...