Assistive Technology Comments

The most interesting assistive technology that I found would have to be the prosthetics. I also think that the prosthetics are the most beneficial to the users. I say this because without limbs, that leaves you with the ability to do very little, but with the help of these fake limbs users can once again do things that they loved to do before they lost their limbs. The most surprising thing I found was the sip and puff systems. I didn’t think that you could get something to function just with breathing patterns and sucking on a straw, that’s amazing to me.
I think it would be a learning experience to use some of the assistive technologies that are out there because it would show us that what we may find difficult to use, someone else finds extremely useful and they’re happy to use it. I think the technology could help with a lot of things, like if you had to type a long paper. Instead of spending hours typing it and backspacing and changing things, you could just use a speech recognition program and talk to the computer and have it type everything for you, so instead of spending hours typing you can just spend a fraction of the time talking.
I know that people who use assistive technologies are most likely going to be looked at since they are different, but usually people don’t say anything. If you were to see a person with a tube coming out of their mouth and they were sitting in a wheelchair completely still, yet they were still obviously controlling the wheelchair to go somewhere, I think you would stare at them too. Not in a disrespectful way, but in a “How is he doing that?” type of way. Most people do not know a whole lot about assistive technologies so they may think it’s weird or unusual to see people who are disabled doing things that the rest of us could already do. I think that if everyone was informed about assistive technologies and how they help disabled people, these people wouldn’t be stared at or thought of differently than any other person.