Developmental and Learning Disabilities

Abstract

People with developmental disabilities are usually one of the last groups to benefit from advances in technology yet special education was quick to adopt information technology even providing exemplars for mainstream education. Educational virtual environments were being developed in special schools and adult training centres when virtual reality was still a novel technology in education. Virtual environments had many characteristics that suited them perfectly to applications for people with developmental disabilities. This explains why they were so readily adopted. However, technology has moved on rapidly since those days with information technology providing smaller, cheaper and mobile solutions. People with developmental disabilities are still collaborating with researchers in the development of novel applications using the most recent technology. This chapter reviews the work on new technologies that have been developed for first of all training and education and secondly for therapy and rehabilitation. The use of the term rehabilitation is sometimes unexpected in the context of a lifelong condition such as having developmental disabilities as it seems to imply that the aim of therapy is to reattain a state that the individual previously occupied for example before having a stroke or a traumatic brain injury. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved)