ABSTRACT
The following article presents issues connected with the shaping of ergonomic quality of the technical environment for people with disabilities, due to the difficulty of obtaining and verifying data on the needs of its users.
The problem of disablement concerns a substantial group of the whole society. It is estimated that over 500 million people in the world (10% of the global population) suffer from different kinds of disabilities. In Poland, according to official data from 2002 there are 14.3% of disabled people in the total population, it means nearly every sixth Pole is disabled.
However, official data on persons with disabilities is often limited to information that is too general to make it useful in the design process. In particular, when there is no potential for the development of technical objects from the start, solving problems of disabled people (but not only theirs) must happen as a compromise. This compromise must take into account not only the needs of different disability groups, which tend to be antagonistic towards each other, but also the needs of all other user groups, as well as an economic calculation of the proposed solutions. When designing or adjusting the technical environment it is 455therefore necessary to reach for the tools which allow for the representation of reality as closely as possible, while at the same time having a lack of data and small samples or regions. For this purpose, a type of estimation that allows us to estimate the parameter values and the distribution in the general population, based on observations obtained in the sample should be used. Particularly interesting seems to be indirect estimation, which allows to achieve a much smaller variance of the estimator in the case of restrictions on the sample or its territoriality (e.g., the value of the relative fraction estimation error is less than almost 75% when compared with direct estimation). The advantage of indirect estimation for determining the needs of disabled people in a given area is that it will be able to strengthen the so-called estimation by borrowing information, which will necessitate resorting to data “scattered” in other records (e.g. social security records).
Indirect estimation may therefore be a way to obtain the necessary level of ergonomic quality of technical creations, through their adaptation to the needs of users in a more perfect manner. Application of the methods in the field of indirect estimation should avoid generalizations that may distort the characteristics of local communities. The higher ergonomic quality obtained in this way will significantly contribute to the life improvement of people being so affected by fate.
