Robots of the future should communicate with humans in a natural way. Hence, we are especially interested in hand motion based gesture interfaces. The purpose of this study was to present a reliable means for human-computer interfacing based on hand gestures made in three dimensions, which could be interpreted and adequately used in controlling a remote robot's movement. In this paper we discus...

Conductive education, an educational approach devised by Andras Petö in Hungary after the second world war, has attracted considerable media attention. Eight Northern Ireland families who recently had treatment for their disabled child at the Petö Institute in Budapest were identified. Six families returned postal questionnaires designed to look at parental experience of conductive education. A...

Sir Ludwig Guttmann touches only lightly upon the enormous change that has since come about in this field. True, he experienced this change and yet did not really participate in it — because it was he who brought it into being. His optimism prevented him from accepting (as we did) the gloomy outlook for paraplegics and tetraplegics; his thorough training in neuropsychiatry and neurosurgery help...

According to literature available on disability, disabled means any activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being. Sociologists and psychologists also have viewed it in different ways. According to Dr. Kessles, physically handicapped are those individual who have a physical defect obvious or hidden, which limits their physical capacity to work. Psychological def...

This paper addresses a wearable master device for physically handicapped persons whose arms are disabled. Optical fiber curvature sensors are used to measure the human body motion. For the developed wearable master device, a calibration and mapping method of the sensors is proposed to extract 2-DOF human shoulder motions. An experiment shows that the wearable master device can be used for a 2-D...

The research on substance (alcohol, tobacco and drug) abuse and on self-perception was done by comparing a test group of physically disabled adolescents and a test group of non-disabled adolescents. The respondents of the experimental group were students of the only special high school for physically handicapped persons in Croatia, Zagreb. The respondents of the control group were the students ...