Assistive Technologies: New Challenges for Education

Abstract

At present the need for interdisciplinary education supporting development and practical application of assistive technologies (AT) is continuously growing. It is given by the development of demographic and age structure of the population and the need to ensure support and safety of elderly and handicapped people with increased health and other risks. Currently there is a lack of graduates having interdisciplinary theoretical education in the fields of electronics and information and communication technologies and simultaneously focusing on the whole complex of practical needs of applications related to assistive technologies. The same situation arises at producers of these technologies. There are very few graduates able to understand and realize complex applications as a whole. Most of the graduates are able to manage separate narrow applications without ability to interconnect them. Therefore we have decided to develop a series of courses that will fill the gap in the education. The courses will become a core of an interdisciplinary study branch in Master study and at the same time they will be offered in life long learning. The core courses cover the following topics: data sensing and transmission; sensors, actuators and control in assistive environment; circuitry and system principles of electronic devices for AT; advanced methods of data mining and knowledge discovery and their applications in AT; telecommunication equipment and systems for AT; multimedia technology; security and safety; system integration; legal, ethical and social aspects of AT. The topics are systematically and logically interconnected. The content is designed in such a way that theory, applications and system integration are represented in suitable proportion.