Intellectual Disability, Digital Technologies, And Independent Transportation – A Scoping Review

Transportation is an essential aspect of everyday life. For people with intellectual disabilities transportation is one the largest barriers to community participation and a cause of inequality. However, digital technologies can reduce barriers for transportation use for people with intellectual disabilities and increase community mobility. The aim of this scoping review was to identify and map existing research on digital technology support for independent transport for people with intellectual disabilities and to identify knowledge gaps relevant for further research. The authors conducted a scoping review of articles presenting digital technologies designed to assist in outdoor navigation for people with intellectual disabilities. The search yielded 3195 items, of which 45 were reviewed and 13 included in this study. The results show that while a variation of design elements was utilized, digital technologies can effectively support individuals with intellectual disability in transport. Further research should focus on multiple contexts and types of transportation, different support needs during independent travel, real-world settings, participatory approaches, and the role of user training to enhance the adoption of digital technologies

The Development and Evaluation of a Mobile App to Facilitate Public Transport Use for Individuals on The Autism Spectrum: A Co-Production Approach

Mortaza developed and evaluated the first evidence-based, autism-specific trip-planning mobile application to facilitate public transport use for autistic people in the Australian context. This tool was co-produced with individuals on the autism spectrum and was effective in making public transport less stressful. The outcome can improve their quality of life, as the ability to independently use public transport can present individuals on the autism spectrum new opportunities for employment, education and social interaction

Technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome: A systematic literature review

This paper presents a systematic literature review on technology-enhanced support for children with Down Syndrome and young people who match the mental age of children considered neurotypical (NT). The main aim is threefold: to (1) explore the field of digital technologies designed to support children with Down Syndrome, (2) identify technology types, contexts of use, profiles of individuals with Down Syndrome, methodological approaches, and the effectiveness of such supports, and (3) draw out opportunities for future research in this specific area. A systematic literature review was conducted on five search engines resulting in a set of 703 articles, which were screened and filtered in a systematic way until they were narrowed to a corpus of 65 articles for further analysis. The synthesis identify several key findings: (1) there is diversity of technology supports available for children with Down Syndrome targeting individual capabilities, (2) overlapping definitions of technology makes it difficult to place technology supports in individual categories rather than subsets of a broader term, (3) the average sample size remained small for participants in the studies, making it difficult to draw solid conclusions on the effectiveness of the related interventions, (4) the distribution of papers indicates that this is an emerging area of research and is starting to build body of knowledge, and (5) there are limited studies on newer emerging technologies which requires further investigation to explore their potential

Assistive technologies as rights enablers

The Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability establish the rights for all children. For some children, enjoying those rights depends on or is facilitated by assistive technology, that is, products adapted or designed for improving the functioning of disabled people and all services inherent to the selection, acquisition, and use of assistive products. This chapter reviews the definition of assistive technology and briefly describes assistive products categories to show the breadth of assistive products available. It then discusses children rights and how they can be mediated or moderated by assistive technologies. Some of the challenges and ethical issues of assistive technology provision for children are also examined.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio