A ‘helping hand’: How technology for the specially-abled creates a world without barriers

Assistive Listening Devices (ALDs) enable personal connections to audio sources for music and TV for those who live with auditory impairments. They serve to amplify sounds, especially when background noise is present. Wearers can use them with a hearing or cochlear implant to help them get the best out of certain sounds. With unrivaled expertise in sound amplification, Clarity, a company from Chattanooga, Tennessee, improves lives with its amplified telephones, notification systems, and assistive listening devices.

Thanks to Augmented and Alternative Communication (AAC) devices, communicating with ease is no longer a privilege for the typically bodied alone. Among the apps that cater to the purpose include TouchChat, a symbol and text-based AAC tool available for Apple products. The app brings with it high-quality text-to-speech voices and pre-programmed, fully customizable vocabulary sets.

Mobilization Devices (wheelchairs) fulfill the bare minimum of helping people with multi-sclerosis, partial paralysis, or weakness of the limbs and muscles to move around. But there is tremendous hope from wheelchairs of the future. Companies are working to integrate robotics, robotic manipulators, flexible manufacturing, 3D printing, and direct brain interfaces to transform wheelchair’s design and use.

Some new-model wheelchairs that are commercially available include TEK Robotic Mobilization Device (RMD), designed to help people with paraplegia and other disabilities to move around in a standing position. RMD provides:

• Better cardiovascular health
• The ability to make eye-to-eye contact
• The freedom to reach high and low

Fulfilling the travel ambitions of the specially-abled is the Mountain Trike, a wheelchair model that works across all terrains, town or countryside, beaches, gravel gateways, and even snow. 

Regenerative medicine works on the incredible principle that damaged tissues can be regenerated anew. Bringing the field to the fore, John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka discovered that mature and specialized cells can be reprogrammed to become stem cells, later developing into human body tissues. The duo was notably accredited with “The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012” for their findings.

The department of Regenerative Sciences at Emirates Hospital, Jumeriah, offers medically advanced solutions to patients struggling with a wide range of diseases that have not previously met with a cure in the field of regenerative medicine.