Tecnologias assistivas computacionais, ou Alta Tecnologia Assistiva (ATA) não podem prescindir de customização para atender efetivamente pessoas com deficiência nas atividades de vida diária e em terapia de reabilitação. Hoje, tais tecnologias são ofertadas de forma padronizada, cabendo aos terapeutas adaptarem-nas para que seus pacientes possam usá-las. O design participativo (DP), como metodologia de envolvimento ativo do usuário no processo de projeto, adequa-se bem à ideia de customização de ATAs, permitindo a participação ativa do usuário com deficiência como co-designer da sua solução. Apesar disso, são raros os estudos que apresentam recomendações para o DP incluindo esses usuários. Quando se considera métodos de DP para incluir pessoas com deficiência, independentemente da deficiência apresentada, nenhum trabalho de pesquisa foi localizado. Visando preencher essa lacuna, esta pesquisa tem o objetivo de propor o PD4CAT Participatory Design for Customized Assistive Technology, método que objetiva auxiliar equipes multidisciplinares a conceberem soluções computacionais customizadas utilizando o DP para o envolvimento ativo da equipe - que inclui a pessoa com deficiência, seus terapeutas e cuidadores - no ciclo de design e desenvolvimento. A metodologia adotada neste trabalho para obter a proposta do PD4CAT foi a pesquisa-ação, em dois ciclos que inseriram os pesquisadores em instituições de reabilitação. Neste processo, foram realizados dois estudos de caso de desenvolvimento de ATAs personalizadas para dois pacientes com paralisia cerebral, com deficiências motora e verbal, sendo um adulto de quarenta e seis anos (M) e, uma criança de quatro anos (MI). Resultaram deste processo as diretrizes que compõem o PD4CAT, bem como as soluções em TAs. / Customization is essential for Computer Assistive Technologies, or High Assistive Technology (HAT), to effectively meet the needs of people with disabilities in their daily activities and in rehabilitation therapy. These technologies are currently provided in a standardized way, and therapists have to adapt them so that their patients can use them. Participatory design (PD), as a methodology that actively involves the user in the design process, is very adequate to customize HATs, allowing active participation by users with impairments as co-designers of their solutions. However, few are the studies presenting recommendations to PD including these users. No research work was spotted considering PD methods to include people with disabilities, independently of their impairment. Aiming to fill this gap, this research proposes PD4CAT Participatory Design for Customized Assistive Technology, a method to aid multidisciplinary teams to conceive customized computer solutions using PD for actively involving the team - which includes persons with impairments, their therapists and caretakers in the design and development cycle. The methodology adopted in this work for obtaining the PD4CAT proposal was the research-action, in two cycles that inserted the researchers in rehabilitation institutions. In the process, two case studies were conducted for developing customized HATs for two patients with cerebral palsy, with motor and verbal impairments, one being a forty-six-year old adult (M) and a four-year-old child (MI). This process resulted in the guidelines composing PD4CAT, as well as the AT solutions.

Education professionals are challenged with re-evaluating the learning capacity of students with developmental disabilities (e.g., intellectual disabilities, autism). Assistive technology (AT) provides both the means for delivery of instruction and the measure of outcomes. Students with developmental disabilities are learning to read and develop general education English Language Arts (ELA) skills across the grade span. This article summarizes ten selected research studies that demonstrate gains of students with developmental disabilities, including individuals who use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC), who have made measurable strides in literacy general education ELA skills. This selected research focused on literacy interventions specifically created for students with developmental disabilities which incorporated the use of AT, use systematic instruction and shared stories, and are commercially available. The research studies include a range of literacy instruction from picture books and early literacy skills to adapted contemporary fiction novels grade aligned to general education secondary level ELA. In these research protocols, AT facilitated both the delivery oof instruction and measure of outcomes.

Background: Hearing aid prescriptive recommendations for hearing losses having a conductive component have received less clinical and research interest than for losses of a sensorineural nature; as a result, much variation remains among current prescriptive methods in their recommendations for conductive and mixed hearing losses (Johnson and Dillon, 2011). Purpose: The primary intent of this brief clinical note is to demonstrate differences between two algebraically equivalent expressions of hearing loss, which have been approaches used historically to generate a prescription for hearing losses with a conductive component. When air and bone conduction thresholds are entered into hearing aid prescriptions designed for nonlinear hearing aids, it was hypothesized that that two expressions would not yield equivalent amounts of prescribed insertion gain and output. These differences are examined for their impact on the maximum power output (MPO) requirements of the hearing aid. Subsequently, the MPO capabilities of two common behind-the-ear (BTE) receiver placement alternatives, receiver-in-aid (RIA) and receiver-in-canal (RIC), are examined. Study Samples: The two expressions of hearing losses examined were the 25% ABG + AC approach and the 75% ABG + BC approach, where ABG refers to air-bone gap, AC refers to air-conduction threshold, and BC refers to bone-conduction threshold. Example hearing loss cases with a conductive component are sampled for calculations. The MPO capabilities of the BTE receiver placements in commercially-available products were obtained from hearing aids on the U.S. federal purchasing contract. Results: Prescribed gain and the required MPO differs markedly between the two approaches. The 75% ABG + BC approach prescribes a compression ratio that is reflective of the amount of sensorineural hearing loss. Not all hearing aids will have the MPO capabilities to support the output requirements for fitting hearing losses with a large conductive component particularly when combined with significant sensorineural hearing loss. Generally, current RIA BTE products have greater output capabilities than RIC BTE products. Conclusions: The 75% ABG + BC approach is more appropriate than the 25% ABG + AC approach because the latter approach inappropriately uses AC thresholds as the basis for determining the compression ratio. That is, for hearing losses with a conductive component, the AC thresholds are not a measure of sensorineural hearing loss and cannot serve as the basis for determining the amount of desired compression. The Australian National Acoustic Laboratories has been using the 75% ABG + BC approach in lieu of the 25% ABG + AC approach since its release of the National Acoustic Laboratories—Non-linear 1 (NAL-NL1) prescriptive method in 1999. Future research may examine whether individuals with conductive hearing loss benefit or prefer more than 75% restoration of the conductive component provided adequate MPO capabilities to support such restoration.

A link between eye movement mechanics and the mental processing associated with text reading has been established in the past. The pausing of an eye gaze on a specific word within a sentence reflects correctness or fluency of a translated text. A cognitive translation system has been built employing a single, inexpensive web camera without the use of infrared illumination. It was shown that the system translates the text, detects rarely occurring and out-of-context words from eye gaze information, and provides solutions in real time while the user is still reading. The solutions are in form of a translation, definition or synonym for the word in question. The only effort required is that of reading.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has been identified as a contemporary instructional model for promoting inclusion and equitable opportunities for diverse and struggling learners. However, research regarding teachers' perceptions of UDL and its effective implementation is limited, making planning, implementing, and providing professional development difficult for administrators. Guided by the constructivist views of Vygotsky and Piaget, this qualitative case study was designed to understand teachers' knowledge and perceptions of how UDL can be used to promote equitable inclusive instruction, implementation barriers, educational applications for UDL, and perceived needs to implement UDL. Participants were teachers who had implemented UDL from a public charter school serving only students in Grades 3-11 with low incidence disabilities; 20 participated in an online survey, 7 participated in an individual interview, and 3 participated in a group interview. Data were coded and analyzed for common themes. Participants expressed resistance to change, negative impressions of UDL, and disability bias. Recommendations for administrators included strategies for implementation of UDL, periodic collection of teachers' perceptions of UDL for formative purposes, modeling UDL for teachers, monitoring teachers' lesson plans, and classroom observations. This study contributes to social change by identifying teachers' perceptions of their own knowledge, needs, and barriers to implementation of UDL in order assist administrators in effectively preparing them for delivery of instructional services to enhance learning for all diverse and struggling students.

The objective of this dissertation is to provide a new design approach to a fully automated book reader for individuals with visual impairment and blindness that is portable and cost effective. This approach relies on the geometry of the design setup and provides the mathematical foundation for integrating, in a unique way, a 3-D space surface map from a low-resolution time of flight (ToF) device with a high-resolution image as means to enhance the reading accuracy of warped images due to the page curvature of bound books and other magazines. The merits of this low cost, but effective automated book reader design include: (1) a seamless registration process of the two imaging modalities so that the low resolution (160 x 120 pixels) height map, acquired by an Argos3D-P100 camera, accurately covers the entire book spread as captured by the high resolution image (3072 x 2304 pixels) of a Canon G6 Camera; (2) a mathematical framework for overcoming the difficulties associated with the curvature of open bound books, a process referred to as the dewarping of the book spread images, and (3) image correction performance comparison between uniform and full height map to determine which map provides the highest Optical Character Recognition (OCR) reading accuracy possible. The design concept could also be applied to address the challenging process of book digitization. This method is dependent on the geometry of the book reader setup for acquiring a 3-D map that yields high reading accuracy once appropriately fused with the high-resolution image. The experiments were performed on a dataset consisting of 200 pages with their corresponding computed and co-registered height maps, which are made available to the research community (cate-book3dmaps.fiu.edu). Improvements to the characters reading accuracy, due to the correction steps, were quantified and measured by introducing the corrected images to an OCR engine and tabulating the number of miss-recognized characters. Furthermore, the resilience of the book reader was tested by introducing a rotational misalignment to the book spreads and comparing the OCR accuracy to those obtained with the standard alignment. The standard alignment yielded an average reading accuracy of 95.55% with the uniform height map (i.e., the height values of the central row of the 3-D map are replicated to approximate all other rows), and 96.11% with the full height maps (i.e., each row has its own height values as obtained from the 3D camera). When the rotational misalignments were taken into account, the results obtained produced average accuracies of 90.63% and 94.75% for the same respective height maps, proving added resilience of the full height map method to potential misalignments.

<p>Syftet med uppsatsen är att bidra till att öka kunskapen om hur tekniska hjälpmedel kan användas för att underlätta vardagen för vuxna människor med ADHD.  För att åstadkomma detta görs en genomgång av vilka problem som kan föreligga vid ADHD och vilka strukturer och aktörer som finns i samhället för att erbjuda hjälp och stöd som vuxna med ADHD kan ha behov av. Därefter betraktas vilka strategier och metoder som kan vara användbara för att kompensera för de problem ADHD kan innebära och hur teknik, såväl specialtillverkade hjälpmedel som vanliga produkter, kan användas för att kompensera. En översikt görs av hur teknik kan utformas för att bli användbar, såväl generellt som mer specifikt rörande utformning av hjälpmedel. Detta åskådliggörs genom exempel från några svenska hjälpmedelsprojekt följt av en probleminventering där ett antal studiebesök och intervjuer har tjänat som en bakgrund för förståelse av den stora mängd strukturer, aktörer och hjälpmedel som är möjliga men emellanåt svårtillgängliga vägar till hjälp för vuxna med ADHD.</p><p> </p><p>De som i slutänden kan avgöra vilken nytta ett hjälpmedel innebär är brukarna själva. Deras upplevelser och erfarenheter är en ovärderlig källa till kunskap. Under arbetets gång har frågeställningen preciserats till att lyda: <em>"Hur kan vanliga mobiltelefoner användas som hjälpmedel för att underlätta vardagen för vuxna med ADHD?"</em>.<em> </em>För att besvara denna fråga har semistrukturerade riktade intervjuer genomförts med fyra kvinnor med ADHD som använder mobiltelefonen som hjälpmedel i sin vardag. Intervjuerna har transkriberats och kategoriserats för att identifiera hur mobiltelefoner används, vad som fungerar bra och mindre bra och vad kan göra att mobiltelefonen upplevs som ett fungerande hjälpmedel.</p><p> </p><p>Resultaten från bearbetning och analys av intervjuerna sammanställs i kapitlet sammanfattande analys i avsnitt med användbara funktioner, användbara egenskaper och perspektiv på stödbehov och hjälparroll. I diskussionskapitlet föreslås sedan vidare användning av resultaten i avsnitten teoretiska implikationer och praktiska implikationer. Min förhoppning är att dessa avsnitt tillsammans med de listor och tumregler som presenterats i den teoretiska referensramen skall kunna vara användbara för att identifiera behov och möjliga lösningar som kan vara värdefulla att pröva i det enskilda fallet.</p><p> </p><p>En person kan behöva stöd för att ta till vara de möjligheter mobiltelefonen erbjuder som hjälpmedel. Hjälpen kan behövas i något eller alla steg från problemidentifiering och införskaffande till införande, fortlöpande uppföljning och utvärdering av hjälpmedelsanvändningen. Stödet kan behöva vara av så väl strukturell och habiliterande art som av teknisk natur för att hjälpmedelsanvändningen skall bli så framgångsrik som är möjligt. Siktet bör vara mot vad som kan innebära kvalitet, mervärde och avlastning för individen i dennes liv, inte vad som är ADHD-symptom och hur dessa skall kompenseras.</p><p> </p><p>Vuxna med ADHD är en mycket heterogen grupp och de resultat som presenteras i uppsatsen är att betrakta som en utgångspunkt för vidare funderingar och prövning snarare än som färdiga lösningar som passar alla med ADHD.</p><p> </p>

For older adults, functional independent mobility is essential to well-being. Many care home residents have physical and cognitive impairments and use wheelchairs. Residents with difficulty self-propelling manual wheelchairs may benefit from power mobility; however, those with cognitive impairments may be precluded because of the potential for injury. My research goals were to apply novel power wheelchair technology to enable safe, independent mobility. Technology was developed to examine the value and implications of power mobility for residents with restricted mobility and mild or moderate cognitive impairments. The first study tested a prototype anti-collision wheelchair with a contact sensor skirt. Six single subject studies were completed. Distances travelled in manual and anti-collision wheelchairs were compared. Observational and interview data were collected. Focus groups (37 staff) and interviews (18 staff, six other residents, one spouse) were performed. Three of six residents were able or had potential to operate the prototype. One resident chose to use it beyond the study, and his mobility and well-being improved. Case analyses showed factors limiting prototype acceptance. Residents were unsatisfied with the appearance and slow speed, and found the interface frustrating to operate because of inadequate feedback. Social isolation and reduced autonomy restricted independence achievable with technology. Socialization and affective benefits of mobility were demonstrated in one case where prototype use was continually assisted. Residents and staff supported the anti-collision concept. On observation, the prototype compensated for absent or delayed responses of residents to obstacles below sensors and decreased injury risk. However, full sensor coverage of the environment was needed. The second study addressed acceptance and interface usability issues. A simulated collision-avoidance wheelchair with a multimodal feedback interface was evaluated. The interface provided audio, visual and haptic feedback to guide navigation away from obstacles. Through observations, interviews and questionnaires, five residents evaluated the device. High device acceptance and usability were found. The device was easy to use and assisted with performance of indoor mobility goals. Further research is necessary before power wheelchairs with new features are available for users; however, these results could play a fundamental role in shaping technology development and mobility interventions for this neglected population.

For older adults, functional independent mobility is essential to well-being. Many care home residents have physical and cognitive impairments and use wheelchairs. Residents with difficulty self-propelling manual wheelchairs may benefit from power mobility; however, those with cognitive impairments may be precluded because of the potential for injury. My research goals were to apply novel power wheelchair technology to enable safe, independent mobility. Technology was developed to examine the value and implications of power mobility for residents with restricted mobility and mild or moderate cognitive impairments. The first study tested a prototype anti-collision wheelchair with a contact sensor skirt. Six single subject studies were completed. Distances travelled in manual and anti-collision wheelchairs were compared. Observational and interview data were collected. Focus groups (37 staff) and interviews (18 staff, six other residents, one spouse) were performed. Three of six residents were able or had potential to operate the prototype. One resident chose to use it beyond the study, and his mobility and well-being improved. Case analyses showed factors limiting prototype acceptance. Residents were unsatisfied with the appearance and slow speed, and found the interface frustrating to operate because of inadequate feedback. Social isolation and reduced autonomy restricted independence achievable with technology. Socialization and affective benefits of mobility were demonstrated in one case where prototype use was continually assisted. Residents and staff supported the anti-collision concept. On observation, the prototype compensated for absent or delayed responses of residents to obstacles below sensors and decreased injury risk. However, full sensor coverage of the environment was needed. The second study addressed acceptance and interface usability issues. A simulated collision-avoidance wheelchair with a multimodal feedback interface was evaluated. The interface provided audio, visual and haptic feedback to guide navigation away from obstacles. Through observations, interviews and questionnaires, five residents evaluated the device. High device acceptance and usability were found. The device was easy to use and assisted with performance of indoor mobility goals. Further research is necessary before power wheelchairs with new features are available for users; however, these results could play a fundamental role in shaping technology development and mobility interventions for this neglected population.

Mitt övergripande syfte med denna studie är att ur ett livsvärldsperspektiv undersöka hur tre elever med läs- och skrivsvårigheter upplever användandet av IT - baserade lärverktyg. Studien vill även ta upp elevernas erfarenheter av att använda sig av IT -baserade lärverktyg i undervisningen som en del av deras lärande, ur dåtida, nutida och framtida perspektiv.   Ansatsen livsvärldsfenomenologi har legat till grund för denna studie. Den ger tillträde till att undersöka och beskriva elevers levda erfarenheter. I livsvärldsfenomenologisk ansats får jag tillträde till personers livsvärldar.   Som metod användes kvalitativ forskningsintervju. I studien visar sig detta genom att jag använde mig av en frågeguide. Mina frågor var få och mitt intresse för elevernas egna berättande var i fokus.     Eleverna beskriver att de IT -baserade lärverktygen har blivit en del av deras livsvärld. Att använda sig av dem i undervisningen ses som en naturlighet. De använder sig dagligen av någon form av IT -baserade lärverktyg. Dessa kan vara datorer, surfplattor eller smartphones. Lärarna har ökat sin kompetens vad det gäller att implementera dessa i undervisningen. I resultatet visar det sig att eleverna upplever ett behov av att använda sig av IT -baserade lärverktyg, för att utveckla sitt lärande i undervisningen. Eleverna ser nyttan med dem. / My purpose with this study is that, from a lifeworld perspective examine how three students with reading and writing difficulties experience the use of assistive technology. In this study you also learn about the students’ experience in the use of assistive technology in teaching as part of their learning from past time, present and future perspective. Lifeworld phenomenology has been the approach for this study. It provides access to investigate and describe the students’ lived experiences. The method that I used is a qualitative research interview. In the study I have used an interview guide. My questions were few and my interest in the students' own narrative was in focus.   Students describe that the assistive technology has become a part of their lifeworld. Making use of them in teaching is seen as an everyday activity. They daily use some form of assistive technology. These can be computers, tablets or smartphones. Teachers have increased their skills when it comes to implementing them in their teaching. The result shows that students feel a need to make use of assistive technology to develop their learning in teaching. They can see the profit in using them.