ABSTRACT

The wheelchair is a key element in one's integration. Without it, it would not be possible to reduce the differences and allow a larger autonomy facing the environment, in the various activities of the daily life, in one's home or out of it. Professional, leisure or spmiing tasks would be jeopardized if the wheelchair didn't exist. Besides the fact that the wheelchair socially represents a symbol of an explicit deficient condition, it establishes, exactly because of that, a "bridge" of communication between the person and the environment. With two main slopes, one referring to the user and the other referring to his environment, it is, in its origin, a laboratory of inquiry where the new technologies adapted to the biomechanical demands of dominant gesture allow a better integration of the disabled person that uses the wheelchair.