ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DISABLED PEOPLE - SHOULD IT WORK? THE FRENCH APPROACH

ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY FOR THE DISABLED PEOPLE

&nbsp;&nbsp;Patients with motor impairments have a reduced action ability particularly those with a pathology involving the four limbs (quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or muscular dystrophy). As proposed by Newell, the action ability of a person is molded by constraints arising from the body, the task and the environment. Accordingly, the factors determining the capacity of a disabled person to act on his/her environment can be related both to his/her bodily impairment, to the skills he/she could acquire during the rehabilitation process and to the adaptive devices he/she can use. Our prospect is to analyze these factors in order to provide rationale for the improvement and the development of assistive aids.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In this paper we give a state of the art of different type of assistive devices available for the severely disabled people and we present the current research activities aiming to facilitate the accessibility to these systems by the end-users.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;The application of assistive technology to compensate the disability and improve the autonomy of the users requires an understanding of the user needs in this domain. Practically the role of our team is to develop new methods to analyze the human-machine interaction during the use of an assistive aid. Practically we experimented our theories of the human-machine interfaces on the rehabilitation robotics systems. Preliminary results with the participation of disabled people from the rehabilitation hospital Raymond Poincar？ of Garches will be also included.