Participative approaches for "technology and autonomous living"

Abstract

This contribution aims to identify which conditions are to be met in accordance with social needs and users' perspectives on technical solutions facilitating autonomous living. In the following, different participative approaches will be proposed for improving the user friendliness of assistive technologies. To achieve this it is important to know what areas of life are affected by Assistive Technologies (AT) and who should be involved at what stage of the research and (product) development process. Consequently, this paper investigates ways of shaping the information and knowledge transfer between technology users as people with special needs and technology developers. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.