A Systematized Approach to Provide Assistive Technology (AT) for Augmentative Communication, to Patients With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS)

This paper describes a systematized approach to assess and provide Assistive Technological equipments that help ALS patients to overtake some the severe limitations posed by this disease, with an emphasis in the area of Augmentative Communication Thanks to a cooperation between the Department of Rehabilitation of a State Hospital and a team of professionals (rehab engineers) working for a Company specialized in AT. patients with ALS of that hospital are referred to those professionals that assess them and suggest to the clinicians the AT devices for AAC: they consider to be the most adequate to the patients The authors developed an AT Integrated System for AAC based on a tablet computer with specific software and a multimodal system of interfaces that will be adaptable ' to the end-user and adequate to be used by the patients, taking into account the progression of the disease As at the time of the writing of this paper not all the data considered as crucial was available what follows is a summary of the work done with preliminary conclusions Full data will be available by the time of the AAATE 2009 Conference, a complete paper will then be presented by the authors