Jill Jepson

The Weston wheelchair mounted assistive robot - the design story

Robotic technology can be used in several ways to benefit people with disabilities. This paper describes the mounting of a robotic arm to a powered wheelchair to assist disabled users in daily activities. Although there are many potential benefits for the disabled user, there are also very strong requirements and compromises, which must be considered in integrating the robotic arm with the wheelchair. This paper focuses on how these integration issues have been addressed.

Study into the Equipment Needs of People with Restricted Growth

This article describes a recent study into the unmet equipment needs of people with restricted growth, carried out by the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering. The study involved selecting a group of people to work with, followed by an exploration of their problems in all areas of daily life. A combination of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews was used to achieve the objective. Information gathered from both the questionnaires and the interviews was collated to form a list of equipment needs and general problem areas experienced by the volunteers. This list was circulated as widely as possible to people with restricted growth with a request to assign a priority rating to each item. The results identified six items of high priority which will be designed at the institute over the next 3 years.

Equipment Review: The BIME Plate Warmer

courses have been established for homeless people by occupational therapists to address the problem of poor living skills (Mobsby et al. 1994). These have been thoroughly evaluated, but additional research is needed to determine the impact that homelessness in general (not just affecting those with mental illness) has on occupational behaviour in order to define further the role that is already emerging for occupational therapists in this field.