Abstract
Assistive technology (AT) is any item, device, software, or product system used to enhance, maintain, or improve the functional abilities of people with disabilities. There are many people with disabilities in the world, including the visually impaired, the hearing impaired, and the physically impaired. We established the National KOSEN Support Equipment Development Network (KOSEN-AT) with technical college faculty members 10 years ago to assist these disabled and elderly people. However, Japan is facing the challenge of a rapidly aging society, and the digital transformation of assistive device development for people with disabilities has not been adequately addressed. A major reason for this is the lack of engineers in Japan who can develop products with an understanding of the needs of people with disabilities and the elderly. In this paper, we describe a new initiative of the GEAR 5.0 program, a practical engineer education program that will enable the development of assistive devices for the physically challenged and the elderly, which started in 2020 at the National Institute of Technology in Japan. We believe that it is necessary to educate technicians not only with conventional specialized skills, but also with a full understanding of the concept of disability and basic skills in assistive technology. Next, we developed “Touch Talker”, a digital text reading system for the visually impaired. As a part of the GEAR 5.0 program, we conducted an evaluation experiment in which students from a technical college experienced visual impairment in the same blindfolded environment as visually impaired people to evaluate the developed assistive device. To verify its importance, we developed a digital text-to-speech system for the visually impaired, “Touch Talker”, as part of the GEAR 5.0 program. We thought that by conducting evaluation experiments in the same blindfolded environment as visually impaired people, we could make technical college students aware of the difficulties of operating digital devices due to visual impairment. The results of the experiment showed that the developed “Touch Talker” was effective for both the visually impaired group and the blindfolded technical college student group. The evaluation results also showed a similar trend, confirming that the evaluation by blindfolded technical college students is effective for the development of assistive devices for the visually impaired. In addition, the technical college students who participated in the evaluation experiment were able to understand the difficulty of operating digital devices by experiencing visual impairment. It was suggested that the perspective of the people involved is important in the development of assistive devices.
Highlights
The enhancement of welfare and medical care for the super-aging society has become an issue in Japan and on a global scale
The subjects were relatively the same age in this evaluation experiment, the average search time of the healthy group of technical college students who usually use smartphones and PCs became faster in the second trial of Task 3
There was no difference in the retrieval time of the first trial for subject B in the visually impaired group when using either “Touch Talker” or the digital IC recorder
Summary
The enhancement of welfare and medical care for the super-aging society has become an issue in Japan and on a global scale. The Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently imposed an obligation on all employers to employ people with disabilities at a rate higher than the legal employment rate, to encourage “people with disabilities to live and work together as members of the community” [1] In response to this social situation, the MEXT has taken the lead in promoting policies in various schools that promote the early realization of an inclusive society based on rational consideration [2,3]. It is preferable to introduce technical education that employs a social implementation model (needs-based) for the development and evaluation of devices and orthotics in collaboration with specialists from various fields such as medical and welfare care In response to such requests from special support schools and medical institutions in each prefecture, the faculty members of 13 NCTs took the lead in establishing the National KOSEN Assistive Technology (AT) Development Network (KOSEN-AT Net). Each technical college has developed various devices and applications for special needs [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]
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