This book describes how assistive technology can help disabled, elderly, and temporarily sick people manage their daily lives better and stay safe in the home. It discusses safety from technical, social, and ethical perspectives, providing examples of the challenges that users, their helpers, and professional carers face with assistive technology in everyday situations.
In this second, expanded, and updated edition, the book offers new insights from user-centered research and shows the latest gadgets in assistive technology to answer the central question: How can users and technology work together to ensure safety? The new edition includes coverage of AI and gadgets in home care, palliative care, and assistive technology.
User-focused and combining experience with research, the book will interest users of these technologies, health professionals who might introduce or prescribe them, engineers who develop and sell assistive technological gadgets, and architects who build safe homes. Researchers and students in fields such as architecture, education, engineering, facility management, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, rehabilitative medicine, physiotherapy, social science, and speech therapy will also find this book valuable.
It provides knowledge and experience in the field of Assistive Technology, examines ways to test its effectiveness from the perspectives of users, health professionals, and researchers from different fields, and lists useful addresses, websites, and literature.