Tag: ACCESSIBILITY

Scientists have successfully demonstrated amazing advancements in prosthetics and other technologies for the disabled in recent years. Electrical impulse technology and mind control systems certainly provide hope for the future, but some analysts believe it could be decades before controllable prostheses and commercial, self-contained options become feasible. According to the BBC, however, ...

Prosthetic limb technology continues to advance at an astounding rate. Despite incredible developments like mind-control capabilities and super-hero implants, two -- albeit incredibly different -- areas still remain vastly underdeveloped: animal-inspired limbs and submersible prosthetic swimming equipment. Bionic paws for cats do already exist, and scientists actually fitted one double-amputee ...

Share As frivolous as new gadgets can often seem, the iPad has served a higher purpose in the Cain-Goldstein household of Brooklyn, where 7-year-old Owen, whose body has been long debilitated by a motor-neuron disease, is now reading books on his own. Watching as her son flipped through the pages of 'Alice in Wonderland' for the first time, Ellen Goldstein cried, "That is completely wonderful." ...

Researchers at the University of Tokyo have created a strange cyborg rat that they hope will help them develop a brain-machine interface (BMI) for controlling motorized wheelchairs. The so-called RatCar is a motorized vehicle that suspends a rat below it and is hooked up via electrodes inserted in the rodent's motor cortex. The rats were then trained to move the cart simply by thinking about ...

When using a GPS, you generally have two choices for getting your directions: looking at the screen, and listening to audio cues. The problem is that taking your eyes off the road, even momentarily, can be dangerous, and the polite British woman (or Darth Vader, depending on your level of geekiness) is not always audible over your blaring stereo and the din of traffic. A new system being ...

Panasonic is set to unveil this entirely non-threatening, hair-washing robot at the International Home Care & Rehabilitation Exhibition in Tokyo next month. Designed for the elderly in assisted living facilities, the 'bot works in conjunction with a mechanical bed that transforms into a wheelchair, thereby preventing granny from shouting racial slurs at the orderlies (or, "easing the burden ...

It'd be hard to find a chunk of society more profoundly influenced by mobile technology than the deaf and otherwise hearing impaired. Ever since the dawn of the smartphone era, deaf cell phone users have been able to communicate more easily with the rest of the world -- and, for the first time, have been able to do so on their terms. Day-to-day life at the Alabama School for the Deaf in ...

Last year, Toyota proudly announced the development of a new mind-controlled wheelchair, which was reportedly capable of interpreting a user's brain waves within a few milliseconds. Now, a group of Swiss scientists have taken the prototype one step further, by adding an extra A.I. touch to a new brain-controlled wheelchair. As Engadget reports, researchers at Switzerland's École ...

Engineers at the University of Washington are currently testing a new device that, if successful, could drastically alter the ways in which deaf and hearing-impaired people use cell phones to communicate. The tool, called MobileASL, uses compressed video signals and motion detection technology to discern American Sign Language, and then transmits images across cellular networks. So far, UW's team ...

Strolling around with your wheelchair-bound loved ones might one day be a whole lot less stressful, thanks to a new robotic wheelchair created in Japan. Designed by researchers at Saitama University's Human-Robot Interaction Center, the wheelchair uses distance sensors and built-in cameras to keep track of a pedestrian's position, allowing the chair to remain on the left-hand side of its targeted ...

A pair of battery-powered bionic legs developed in New Zealand could help paraplegics to walk again, and, in turn, send wheelchairs to the junkyard. According to Engadget, the Rex robotic exoskeleton is operated using a simple joystick and control pad, and it can support the weight of a full-grown adult. Each pair of legs is custom-built to suit an individual's unique stature (the guy pictured ...

We're sure that you've all found yourselves in a crowded noisy bar at some point, struggling to hold a conversation with the person sitting next to you. Scottish design student Elaine McLuskey was studying hearing impairments when she discovered during her research that, sometimes, a person's environment can more detrimentally affect hearing than any physical disability. She explained further to ...

While most of us continue to "ooh" and "ahh" over the flood of books that have been newly digitized for iPads and e-readers, blind bibliophiles are confined to the comparatively piddling collection of digitized books published in formats accessible to them. San Francisco's Internet Archive, however, has undertaken an ambitious digital archiving project to make sure that blind and dyslexic readers ...

While they can have a conversation, visually impaired people miss out on the most important part -- facial expressions. But a new system could change the blind's perception. According to Popular Science, a student -- as a thesis project at Umeà University in Sweden -- has developed a potentially groundbreaking technology that uses a Web-cam and a computer to transmit a series of vibrations, ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. We promise this is not a creepy sex toy. In fact, this moaning rubber mouth is an aid for the hearing impaired, specifically designed to help them improve their vocal ...