This book describes how assistive technology can help handicapped,
elderly and acutely sick people to manage their daily lives better and
stay safe in the home. It discusses how safety is understood from an
ethical, technical and social perspective, and offers examples of the
problems that users, their helpers and professional carers have with
assistive technology in everyday situations.
The book provides insights from user-centred research and uses
photographs to illustrate the main topic: how users and technology can
work together to ensure safety. User-focused and combining experience
with research, the book will interest users of these kinds of
technology, health professionals who might introduce and/or prescribe
them, engineers who develop and sell assistive technological gadgets,
and architects who build safe homes - as well as researchers and
students who work in these fields. It provides an overview of the
existing technology, examines ways to test its effectiveness from the
point of view of users, health professionals and researchers from
different fields (architecture, education, engineering, facility
management, medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, rehabilitative
medicine, physiotherapy, social science and speech therapy), and lists
useful addresses, websites and literature
