A collaboration between leading scientists, practitioners, and researchers at Carnegie-Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, this book is a comprehensive resource describing Quality of Life technologies and their development, evaluation, adoption, and commercialization. It takes an interdisciplinary team approach to the process of technology development for disabled and older persons and discusses the state of the art and future directions of technologies. This work provides direction on how to identify user needs and preferences, engage end-users in the design and...

Assistive technology has made it feasible for individuals with a wide range of impairments to engage in many activities, such as education and employment, in ways not previously possible. The key factor is to create consumer-driven technologies that solve the problems by addressing the needs of persons with visual impairments. Assistive Technology for Blindness and Low Vision explores a broad range of technologies that are improving the lives of these individuals. Presenting the current state of the art, this book emphasizes what can be learned from past successful products, as well as...

This book provides the necessary tools for the evaluation of the interaction between the user who is disabled and the computer system that was designed to assist that person. The book creates an evaluation process that is able to assess the user's satisfaction with a developed system. Presenting a new theoretical perspective in the human computer interaction evaluation of disabled persons, it takes into account all of the individuals involved in the evaluation process.

Rehabilitation is dedicated to helping people not only survive, but also thrive. Despite this complex goal, the organizing principles of rehabilitation still rely on biomedicine to construct disability as a problem of impaired bodies. Rehabilitation professionals are committed to helping to enhance people s lives, but many struggle with how to do so in light of the bigger questions regarding their roles in, for example, working to maintain hope for recovery and/or promoting greater acceptance of diverse abilities. A key problem is the lack of theoretical tools for working through the...

This work combines coverage of both spasticity and contractures as these two phenomena are often closely interrelated. Current researchers do not differentiate between these individual impairments and, as a result, there is significant confusion in the literature. This book discusses both conditions and then separates them into their respective components. If these two conditions co-exist (which is generally the case), then the management of a patient will need to be customized to individual clinical presentation. This book covers this approach in detail.

Geriatric Rehabilitation addresses the fact that this is an age in which individuals have increasing longevity, better health care, education and expectations of health care which present new, increasing and even radical challenges to health care providers.

The care of our older patients in rehabilitation settings demands the broad understanding of the key differences in strategies to care for older adults. The combined skills embraced in rehabilitation and geriatrics are presenting unprecedented opportunities for both fields to make substantive and even ground-breaking...

This book provides a wide spectrum of readers with comprehensive but easily understandable protocols for the assessment and training of wheelchair skills. The Wheelchair Research Team at Dalhousie University and the Capital District Health Authority in Halifax (lead by the author) have focused on wheelchair safety and performance for three decades, as exemplified through the Wheelchair Skills Program. This is considered the top such program in the world. This new book is largely based on this program which has been accessed and utilized by over 75,000 people in 177 countries since 2007....