Growing into old age is a personal privilege and a societal achievement. However, it is also a challenge for both the individuals and societies. The impressive gains in extending average physical longevity to 75 years and beyond is not necessary accompanied by high-levels of physical, psychological, and brain “fitness”. Thus, it is important to seek ways to help older adults maintaining functio...

Over the past decade speech and language therapy has taken an interesting turn towards the use of information communication technologies (ICTs) for diagnosis of disorders and delivery of therapy. In many cases ICTs have worked as assistive tools to therapists, while in others as sole providers of therapy, especially in remote areas. In this report we provide a brief overview of the most represe...

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...