Project Overview

People with disabilities have a very close relationship with their assistive technology—whether this is a wheelchair, a long cane, or a smart voice board. These technologies clearly enable users to achieve more than they could without them. What is unclear is how this affects the user’s quality of life as well as the quality of life of those around them. Research into extended cognition suggests that fully integrating technology with a user can yield much more than a mere addition of the technology’s abilities. Rather, full integration can result in the user being not only augmented by the technology but potentially also actually experiencing the world through it. The technology is considered to shape the way that the user perceives and acts in their world in such important respects that it becomes best to consider the user and the technology as an “extended cognitive system”.

The purpose of the overall project, for which this is a pilot, is to investigate what this process of integration looks like in practice and what can we learn from this that might improve the way we provide and facilitate educational supports for assistive technology users.