ABSTRACT
For people living with disabilities, technology can be integral to rehabilitation, being used to support people to live as independently as possible by enabling participation in chosen and essential activities in the context of their daily lives. Technology can achieve this by reducing gaps between individual capacities and disabling environments. ‘Traditional’ approaches to technology provision for people living with disability have been to prescribe specialist assistive devices. However, rehabilitation-focused technology interventions are associated with high levels of user dissatisfaction and high rates of abandonment, both of which indicate that people living with disabilities may continue to live with unnecessary barriers to independent living. Using the experiences of a specialist neuro-rehabilitation team in Edinburgh, this chapter examines the reasons why some technology-led rehabilitation interventions fail and considers the challenges involved in moving from technology-led to person-centred technology interventions. This includes issues associated with the identification and measurement of participation outcomes, introducing readers to central concepts and potential tools that can be used to achieve this. The principles and evidence for co-designing successful individualised, person-centred technology interventions are explored and the techniques, skills, and resources required for achieving this in practice discussed. Challenges and potential techniques associated with designing research to test complex person-centred interventions using technology are examined, in particular the challenges of studying process rather than product-oriented interventions.
