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Assistive Technology Industry Association (ATIA) 2005 Conference Highlights By John Ficarro, Ph.D., Project Director
This year’s ATIA conference demonstrated the growth of Assistive Technology with a plethora of new and improved devices. This conference focuses more on devices in the areas of vision, hearing, and learning software for school age children. While there were a few vendors showing mobility devices, these are covered more extensively at the summer annual conference of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA). One of the trends over the years is that assistive technology (AT) devices that were developed by small “mom and pop” operations have been bought out by larger and larger corporations. So at ATIA it was not uncommon to see names like Microsoft, HP and others. This is very good for consumers. On a system for voice control of a computer, for example, this means that costs have dropped dramatically. In addition, these large companies work with smaller feeder companies that can add many “add on packages” to the basic software. And with the additional power of these larger corporations, equipment evolution occurs much more quickly. |
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