Acknowledgements The publication of this book is the result of a collaboration between TechDis and the Association for Learning Technology who have worked together to commission and edit the contributions. Both TechDis and the Association for Learning Technology would like to acknowledge the following people who have contributed chapters for this book: The following contributed to the reviewing...

the situation of people with disabilities in the developing countries should be a matter of great concern. there are today close to 250 million severely and moderately disabled persons in these countries; the annual increase is 10 million. most of them are poor, dependent neglected, excluded from education, training and jobs; they die early and have no power while alive. between 15 and 20% of a...

Objectives: This study aims to identify the burdens among wives of disabled people in the light of some independent variables. Methods: In this descriptive cross-sectional study, 197 domestic wives were surveyed using a standardized questionnaire to measure the burden among wives of disabled people. Data were collected using the independent variables and Zarit caregiver burden scale (ZCBS) for...

In its attempt to offer new ways into autonomy for a large population of disabled people, assistive technology has largely been inspired by robotics engineering. Recent human-like robots carry new hopes that it seems to us necessary to analyze by means of a specific theory of anthropomorphism. We propose to distinguish a functional anthropomorphism which is the one of actual wheelchairs from a ...

This paper demonstrates how physically disabled people can benefit from the innovative virtual reality techniques. Several specific examples show the applicability of virtual reality to the therapy and rehabilitation of people with various disabilities. In addition, the paper describes how physicians can use virtual reality as an advanced visualization tool for the diagnosis of physical disabil...

Development is underway on an intelligent powerchair (iChair) for people with severe disabilities. Research is focused on developing the software that gives a power chair equipped with computing hardware and state-of-the-art sensors, and the intelligence to assist people who cannot use their arms or legs or eyes, to live a high-quality, independent lifestyle. After a brief overview in the intro...

We present the advantages of guided sentences composition for communicating in natural language with computers. We show how guidance can be achieved by means of the partial synthesis of sentences and describe our approach consisting in separating knowledge that comes under different levels of well-formedness and coroutining their treatment. This approach has led us to develop in Prolog a softwa...