Overcoming Disabilities with Technology

When a person suffers with a disability, their ability to be able to do routine everyday tasks is hampered. Rehabilitation technology helps them overcome the limitations that come with physical disability, allowing them to lead a life of comfort and integrity.

Technology has grown over the last few decades, and it has ensured to expand its outreach over this time. From helping us to make complex calculations to providing us with HUD’s transparent display, technology has been evolving drastically, and continues to do so. Technology has focused on enabling people to do things that they once found impossible. This is why physical disability has been on technology’s radar for quite some time now.

Stroke Rehabilitation Technology

When a person suffers a stroke, chances of her becoming disabled in doing certain tasks are quite high. In case of an injury, rehabilitation is required for the patients to be in the best possible shape. Extensive research in the field of healthcare has led to people realizing how technology can be used in stroke rehabilitation. A major innovation in stroke rehabilitation technology is video games especially developed for patients who have suffered a stroke.

These games are engaging and exciting to catch the interest of the patient. The game often allows the doctor to help a patient in rehabilitating without the need to physically present with her. One such video game that is being used for stroke rehabilitation is Bandit’s Shark Showdown. In this game, the players get to control a shark. This controlling of shark simulates the patient’s muscle movement, which helps in triggering their brain and body. Such games are crucial as they focus on engaging muscles and their communication with the brain. Slowly but steadily, these games help patients recover from the shock quite well.

Alzheimer’s Rehabilitation Technology

Alzheimer’s is a disease that disrupts a person’s ability to remember events. In Alzheimer’s, a patient can even forget about the food that she had only sometime back. One of the major things that can help an Alzheimer’s patient is support from their family.

However, apart from family support, patients with this problem can be helped with technology too. Currently, there are certain mobile applications that can help in Alzheimer’s. These applications focus on reminding patients about the activities from the past and alarming them about the activities that they need to do throughout the day

Children’s Rehabilitation Technology

Challenges faced by children with disabilities are different and require extensive focus during rehab. Researchers have been earnestly working to help these children in developing social skills and becoming employable later on. With the help of Tablet PCs, these children are able to enhance their cognitive and motor skills. This is because these PCs are touch enhanced, unlike the stereotype keyboard PCs that require excessive motor usage.

These technologies enable the children to become self-sufficient and independent. As such technologies focus on empowering and enabling the children to convert their disabilities into abilities, they have become an inseparable part of rehabilitation programs for children.

Rehabilitation technologies are available for everyone to use, but for some odd reason they’ve failed to achieve mass adoption. One of the main reasons is that majority of the people with disabilities don’t know how technology can help them during rehabilitation. On the other hand, people who know how technology can help in medical rehabilitation cannot afford it. Research to make these technologies more affordable and popular is on.