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Invisible disability and Technology

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TimT
TimT Community member Posts: 2 Listener
in Aids, adaptations, and equipment

Hi there - I'm participating in a project where we are trying to help resolve an issue for any invisible disability using technology. I've been researching some of the disabilities related such as Colourblindness, Diabetes, Epilepsy, Hearing/Sight issues, HIV amongst many others, however its difficult without being a sufferer to understand what could make your life easier !

Does anybody out there suffering with an invisible disability (or not for that matter) have any great ideas of technology that could help with your day to day lives.

Thanks in advance to those that respond :)


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  • dolfrog
    dolfrog Community member Posts: 441 Pioneering
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    There is no one size fits all.There are a wide range of invisible disabilities which all have various forms of personal limitations. And some can have multiple invisible disabilities which can be part of a single diagnostic label.
    Some years ago I listed some PubMed research paper collections regarding some invisible disabilities on my Wikipedia User page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Dolfrog#Invisible_Disabilities which you may find of some interest.
    Each one has its own set of symptoms and limitations, and may require many different types of technology to provide soem form of help and support. 
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  • TimT
    TimT Community member Posts: 2 Listener
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    Great source of information, thanks very much for that :)

    The challenge we are taking part in has many teams all trying to focus on anything related to invisible disabilities. We'd like to focus on a particular disability and overcome a challenge in the daily life of a sufferer, but pinpointing something is difficult. We'd had various ideas around speech translator for the hard of hearing, Contrast converter for colourblindness.....but seem to have been beaten to it as apps already exist !

    Any ideas would be very welcome, and it would mean a lot more to overcome a real life issue.
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  • dolfrog
    dolfrog Community member Posts: 441 Pioneering
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    Well you could try to develop some technology for those of us who the various types of Auditory Processing Disorder, which is a listening disability, the brain having problems processing what the ears hear. There are currently 4 types of Auditory Processing Disorder, but as international research increases the understanding of the functioning of the  human Auditory System the research will probably break down the complex issues into more inter-related categories. 

    Those of us who have the temporal type of Auditory Processing Disorder have problems processing the gaps between sounds, which can include the sounds that make up a word, and the gaps between words in rapid speech. Which means that those who talk to fast for us come across a just making one continous noise. (An example can be the robot telephone answering systems, and the rapid speech used by the robots trained  to marketing products and services)
    So we need a good quality sound recording application which we can use to slow down the rate of speech and providing a good quality of sound say between 50% and 66% rates of the speed of speech so that we can begin t understand what the clowns have been saying.
    Unfortunately some communities naturally speak at too fast a rate, which means that most of what they may say comes across an just one continuous unintelegable noise. Many radio adverts are like this when they speed up their rate of speech, pure disability discrimination. 
    You could have a look at one of my evernote web pages which describes the 4 Types of Auditory Processing Disorder at 
    https://www.evernote.com/shard/s329/sh/35c143f8-30d8-4b16-81d9-bb9bbd34449f/23638e20a161955c968bedd5bf0e59c9 
    and may be the graphics i ave to created to help explain things at 
    https://dolfrog.wordpress.com/2020/04/03/some-auditory-processing-disorder-graphics/  

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