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IT Control of Amenities for the Disabled
| Title | IT Control of Amenities for the Disabled |
| Aidamount | 250.000 |
| Organization | The County of North Jutland, the Handicap Sector |
| Conclusion | Ingen side valgt |
| Homepage | No homepage |
| Contact | Leif Krushave, Principal krushave@post6.tele.dk |
| Other participants | Midtfjord EDB |
| Theme | Education |
| Keywords | Handicapped
Personal aids |
| Project start | 01 October 2001 |
| Project end | 31 March 2003 |
| Description | The Projectet is Based on the Following Definition of IT Enabled Communications:
To the heavily disabled the meaning of IT enabled communications covers other fields and more than what is traditionally understood by communications.
Communications is also about how to tell your CD player, "I want to hear this and that track on this and that CD." Or how to tell your cell phone, "I want to call this and that person."
Or how to retrieve concrete information on the Internet by simple movements, and how to enable multi-handicapped with a loss of language and textual understanding to communicate via the Web.
Today there is a solution to "almost" every problem, however, only as stand-alone solutions. Even the non - handicapped know the problem of 5 or 6 different remote controls with small hard-to-hit keys, and small hard-to-read symbols. If adding to this you are coping with a physical or mental challenge, you are totally lost.
In Other Words:
What needs to be done is integrating the various systems to be controlled via one PC unit and a control application simple enough to be operated regardless of any handicap. Furthermore setting up the control application should be simple enough to allow relations and family/staff etc. with common user knowledge of IT to set up new functionalities (for example a new CD, a new telephone number with a photo, etc.)
Skills:
Within the fields of social education and aid to the disabled, “skills” are the vital base of the individual's interaction with surroundings and “mastering” one's own life. In the socioeducational understanding, Control of Amenities and Skills are synonymous.
In the educational understanding, referring to control of surroundings or amenities in the way of being capable of operating a telephone, a computer, opening/shutting doors, music, TV etc., means a personal skill, enabling the individual to communicate without anybody interfering, and hence without a helper's expressed or unspoken influence, be it ethically, morally etc., and this will avoid discouraging the disabled individual from gaining control of his surroundings on his or her own terms.
The Goal of the Project:
Scattered around in Denmark and Scandinavia we know quite a few parents, relatives and aid professionals with ideas for solutions to individual concrete needs, or who have already developed small programs to serve such purposes in co-operation with friends possessing IT capabilities.
The general goal of this project is to gather all these ideas and software fragments (in Denmark/Scandinavia) for a review and pedagogical feasibility assessment including their potential for further use and combinations.
On the basis of this material a requirements specification will be compiled to define a functionally convenient controller software for the control of amenities operated by the heavily physically/mentally disabled, and to encourage the companies supplying handicap aid facilities and hardware/software to further co-operate and develop solutions helping the disabled to gain control of their amenities.
To the widest extent possible, all collected material, knowledge and any programs should be made available to everyone interested via the Web pages of the County of North Jutland or other relevant sites. |
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