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Assistive Technology is creating new opportunities for the disabled. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), nearly 1 billion people in the world suffer from some sort of vision, speech or hearing impairment. Assistive Technology, also called Accessible Technology or Adaptive Technology, is playing a major role in enabling the disabled to lead a near normal life.

With more companies embracing modern technology to develop user-friendly devices which assist the disabled, the possibilities for travel, education and employment for the disabled continues to grow. St. Louis-based Electronic Speech Enhancement (ESE) has come up with a speech enhancement gadget designed to help people who lack not only in the volume of their speech but also in the neuromuscular control necessary to talk clearly. This gadget is a battery-powered cordless headset that helps people with indistinct and incomprehensible voices use wireless phones.

In this phone, the user wears a Spectrum VP voice processor and talks into a microphone that is either part of a handset or fixed to a collar. The gadget makes the speech clear, amplifies it and then flashes a signal to a wireless unit attached to a computer. Using specialized software, the computer takes the audible speech from the base station and transmits it over standard phone lines thereby making the speech understandable. These gadgets have come to the aid of many people challenged by speech or mobility impairments, particularly those afflicted by Parkinson’s disease and cerebral palsy.

Text-display phones (TTY) have come to the aid of the hearing impaired wherein the networks are monitored by trained operators who swiftly translate conversations into text and pass them to users with hearing impairment.

With major league companies such as Microsoft, Apple Computer, IBM, HP and Dell involved in the development of user-friendly Assistive Technology hardware, we can look forward to seeing millions of people improve the quality of their lives through technology.