Assistive Technology for Daily Living

Abstract

The activities attribute of the comprehensive assistive technology (CAT) model, developed by the authors and presented in Chapter 1, has six main categories, of which three are categorized as fundamental activities and three as contextual ac-tivities. The assistive technology required to support blind and visually impaired people in carrying out activities in the fundamental activity categories, mobility and communication and access to information, has been discussed in previous chapters. Most blind and visually impaired people do not require assistive tech-nology to support activities in the third category, cognitive activities. This chapter and Chapter 18 will discuss the assistive technology required to support blind and visually impaired people in carrying out contextual activities. This chapter will focus on the technologies required for daily living, whereas Chap-ter 18 will consider the technologies required to support blind people in education, employment and recreational activities. The chapter will also consider the solution of accessibility issues associated with communications and information technolo-gies other than computers and the Internet, telecommunications and print media. Despite being a component of one of the fundamental activities rather than a con-textual activity, this access to information and communication topic fits logically into this chapter, since it includes the use of smart cards and information kiosks, which are mainly used in daily living applications. As the name implies, daily living involves a wide range of different activities that are carried out on a regular basis, often every day or even several times a day. Most of these activities take place in the home environment, though some of them, such as shopping, take place outside it. The CAT model is used to provide the categorization of daily living activities required in order to provide a comprehensive treatment of the assistive technology needed to support these activities and enable blind and visually impaired people to live independently in their home setting. The assistive technologies used to overcome accessibility barriers in daily living range from simple low technology devices to very sophisticated and specialized high technology devices, giving the chapter a large number of subsections and coverage of a very wide range of different types of engineering solutions. The chapter provides descriptions of devices and, in some cases, details of the engineering p…