For persons with disabilities, their impairments lead to many inconveniences in their daily life. Luckily, assistive technology devices can help compensate functional limitations and enable them to participate in the activities of daily life. In 2010, there were 126,693 disabilities in the Kaohsiung area. Subsidies provided by Kaohsiung city government and Kaohsiung county government reach respectively NT$39,145,000 and NT$ 25,489,000 in 2010. Nevertheless, such great amount of money invested does not work as it has been expected. There appear to remain a number of barriers. One such example would be that persons with disabilities lack the knowledge about assistive technology, so they do not know where to ask for help in the first place. On the other hand, lack of consideration for the needs of a person with disability result in them getting inappropriate assistive technology devices. These problems deserve the attention of government and related associations. This research aims to solve the problems between the supply and demand of assistive technology devices or services. It reviews and studies papers concerning the same issue in an attempt to create a new service platform. This platform is created according to information and suggestion gathered from experts of this field and voice from users of assistive devices. Their voices and assessments provide valuable direction to shape this new platform. This research assesses the possibility of this new assistive technology service platform from several aspects, including its political, legislative, supplying, and demanding dimensions. The purpose of this study is to reorganize diverse resources to provide a more convenient information-gathering method and to offer a complete service for disabilities people.

For decades the care of disabled population in Brazil has been neglected by the government and was provided largely by the charitable institutions. It was as only recently, as in the year 2011 that Brazilian government created the national plan for the rights of the disabled people. The plan articulates policies regarding social inclusion, access to education, accessibility and health care. The last section of the plan includes the provision of wheelchairs free of cost to the Brazilians citizens, who are in need of a wheelchair. It is common knowledge that a wrong wheelchair specification can lead to physical damage for the user and the carer; the abandonment of device, and wastage of time and resources involved in the wheelchair provision. The World Health Organization has propounded several good practices and training material with reference to wheelchair services towards enabling of right wheelchair fit to the user characteristics. Though, there is no evidence that the service provided in Brazil adheres to these guidelines or any other wheelchair service good practice. This research reviews the wheelchair service provision in Belo Horizonte city, Brazil with the aim to understand the functionality of these services in order to provide context-specific interventions and recommendations to improve the design of current services. Herein, three main studies were conducted using a mix of methods: A first exploratory study was conducted to assess the Belo Horizonte assistive technology services and identify a research focus. A second study was conducted to develop an in-depth insight on the understanding of the wheelchair service provided and to collect the necessary information towards creating a context-based and collaborative designed intervention. A third study was conducted to evaluate and improve the proposed interventions. A total of sixty-six interviews were conducted (n=66) with service stakeholders and two hundred and fifty user care observed (n=250) from which ninety-five (n=95) tested the proposed interventions.