Top Ten Rehab
Technologies
Denis Anson
September 5, 2007
"Not in any particular order,
but I'd say that among the watershed technologies in Assistive Technology
are:"
1. The Adaptive Firmware
Card
Developed by Paul
Schweda in the late 1970s, this card allowed people with severe disabilities to
access "mainstream" computer programs on the Apple II. The card included
virtually all modern access technologies (expanded keyboard support, Morse,
single switch) except for voice input, and worked in a computer that didn't
have a real operating system, to allow keyboard replacement in virtually any
program. It promoted the idea that people with disabilities should be able to
use the same programs as anyone else, not just the programs produced by
hobbyist therapists.
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2. Quickie UltraLight
Wheelchairs
Back in the day when standard
wheelchairs were big, heavy, flexible, and inefficient, Quickie showed up with
rigid chairs that were light weight and adjustable. Originally designed for
wheelchair athletes, we found they were actually most useful for folks with
very limited endurance, who lacked the energy to propel themselves in
conventional wheelchairs.
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3. High-precision Bearings in
Wheelchairs
Those old wheelchairs, and even the early
ultra-lights used standard wheel bearings, which meant that you could push them
and they'd quickly roll to a stop. Then we started getting high-precision
bearings, and the silly things started rolling, on their own, to the low points
in the therapy area floor if you forgot to set the wheel locks. Suddenly, the
effort required to propel all chairs, and especially ultra-lights, decreased
markedly!
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4. Portable Augmentative
Communication Systems
When the
Adaptive Firmware Card came out, it included a demo program that allowed
messages to be stored behind keys of the Unicorn Keyboard. When you pressed a
key, the attached Echo synthesizer spoke the message. Therapists went wild!
It's a communication system! It's lets non-vocal folks talk! And here is where
you plug it in! Of course, it wasn't a communication system, it was a quick and
dirty demo program in AppleSoft BASIC. But later, Zygo, among others, developed
systems that did the same thing, and that had enough batteries to operate in
the real world. Those big, clunky, and *SLOW* systems started it all.
Photo courtesy of Alan Cantor
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5. Dragon Dicatate
It cost $6000! It
required the most powerful PC money could buy, and it required that you stop
after each word to let it decide what word you had spoken, but it was a large
vocabulary, general purpose speech to text system that allowed people who
couldn't use the keyboard to generate written text.
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6. IBM ViaVoice
Introduced at $149, it forced the price of speech
recognition down to a level that mere mortals could afford. In the process, it
also moved speech recognition into the mainstream, and away from disability, so
the customer support changed to a much lower level of
involvement.
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7. LC Technologies Eye Gaze
Computer
I first saw this at a
RESNA conference exhibit hall, and was blown away. I could sit at the computer,
and just by looking at letters on the screen, type. I could look away and look
back, and go right on typing. It was cool! While I was gazing, a person came in
to the booth behind me, and, after a moment, asked what it cost. I don't recall
exactly what the price was, but I think it was on the order of $60,000. The
person squawked, "Why would I spend $60,000 on this, when right over there, I
can buy a HeadMaster for $1000?" The booth person said, "If you could use a
HeadMaster, you'd be out of your mind to buy one of these. This is for people
who can't use anything else." In 1994, they had sold 50, but they allowed 50
people to talk and to work who would not have been able to do anything
else.
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8. Morse Code Input
Al Ross, at University
of Washington, was a ham radio operator as well as a communications specialist.
In the course of his work, he started to wonder if people with profound
disabilities might be able to use Morse Code to communicate. He wrote a grant,
and did some research with Kathy Yorkston, a speech pathologist, and some
others, and found that, indeed, Morse could be used by people with significant
cognitive disorders to allow communication at much faster rates than single
switch scanning. As part of the project, they built some communication systems
to be used for the 6 months of the study (1980). In the late 1990s, some of
these communicators were still in daily use.
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9. Dynamic Display AAC
Systems
Early communication systems were limited by the
number of keys that could be used, and the amount of information that could be
displayed at once. You could swap overlays to get more versatility, but that
meant that someone else had to assist (in most cases). If you put lots of icons
on the screen, the clutter make it difficult to interpret for many. If you ask
the user to remember what the generic symbols mean, you put a lot of load on
them. But with dynamic displays, you only have to show the current meaning of a
key, not all of them, and the user doesn't have to remember as
much.
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10. Graphical Computer
Displays
A watershed event, but not one for the
better. Text screens are easy. You need to be able to emulate a keyboard, and
generate 128 unique characters. Piece of cake. Then we got the Mac, and
Windows. Now, you need to be able to move to any spot on the screen, you need
to be able to capture text off the screen without knowing where it is (it's not
just the 40th character in the 12th row, it can be anywhere!). The difficulty
in providing access to a graphical computer, as compared with a text based one
is immense. It was a great leap backwards for disability access, and one that
we are still recovering from. (How's your access to Vista?)
Photo courtesy of Denis Anson
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- Denis Anson, MS, OTR
- Director of Research and
Development
- Assistive Technology Research
Institute
- College Misericordia
- 570/674-6413
- 570/674-8054 fax
- danson-at-misericordia.edu
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