手机助老助残技术的研究与进展

Research and Development in Mobile Phone Enabled Technologies for Assisting the Disabled and Elderly People

老年人与残疾人是现代社会中的弱势群体,由于自身存在的生理缺陷,在生活、工作和学习中常常面临诸多不便。随着现代技术的飞速发展,围绕手机的开发和应用不断推陈出新,使其日益成为人们生活中不可或缺的基本工具。可以预见,充分借助手机这种最为普及的电子功能媒介来更好地辅助残疾人和老年人的生活,改善其生活质量必将成为现代医疗健康技术发展的一个重要前沿。本文通过深入剖析残疾人的技术需求,归纳出手机在助老助残中的关键问题,评述了手机助残技术的发展现状,着重讨论了手机在助视、助听领域中的典型技术,最后对手机助残技术的研究与应用进行了展望。

The disabled and elderly are disadvantaged groups in modem society, who often suffer from much inconveniences in daily life because of their physical handicaps. With the rapid progress in latest technologies, various innovations and applications on mobile phone are continuously increasing, making it a most basic tool for people. It can be anticipated that, taking full advantages of the multi-functions of mobile phone, the most widely adopted electric medium in this day and age, to better assist the disabled and improve their quality of life should become an ever important frontier in modem health technology. In this paper, through digesting the current situations facing the disabled so as to find out their requirements for technologies, we summarized the key issues in the mobile phone enabled assistive technologies for the elderly and disabled. The state-of-art methods were comprehensively reviewed. Particularly, typical technologies of using mobile phone for visual and hearing aids were discussed. Finally, prospects of investigating and applying mobile phone for assisting the disabled were outlined.