Research on the Future of Assistive Technology for People with Locomotive Disabilities

Abstract

Physical impairments may limit or prohibit a person from engaging in many of life's activities. Assistive technologies (ATs) provide essential aids for people with disabilities (PwDs), who would otherwise struggle to participate fully in society without them. This study looks at the history and present state of assistive technologies (ATs) for people with disabilities (PwDs) in India in order to predict how ATs would develop by 2035 and provide some optimism that the gap may be narrowed as much as possible by that year. A survey was utilized to collect primary data, while a search of the patent databases (WIPO, USPTO, and IPINDIA) and an analysis of scholarly articles provided secondary data. Experts from a wide variety of fields (business, academia, government, NGOs, etc.) participated in this Delphi survey. The experts were given a general trend of the advancement of technology over the previous decades to enable them make predictions about the expected time-frame of adoption/commercialization of certain ATs. In this article, we provide the results of a Delphi exercise that identified possible assistive technologies and estimated when they would become available.