Overall objectives:

1 - The goal of this course is to expose students to the engineering, medical, and social issues faced by individuals with special needs through the design, development and use of technology for health and wellness. Specific learning objectives are:
2 - Learn about the challenges and realities of people with disabilities.
3 - Understand principles and complexities of technology for health and wellness design and engineering.
4 - Gain experience in a team-based project.
5 - Critically select appropriate user-centred design methods to design/develop/evaluate technologies for health and wellness.
6 - Evaluation methods including both quantitative and qualitative.
7 - Enhance students' communication skills, with specific emphasis on in-class discussions and project presentations.

Syllabus:

1 - Introduction to Disability, Rehabilitation and Assistive Technologies
2 - Technologies that assist people who have disabilities
3 - Activity, human, and context
4 - Delivering assistive technology to the user
5 - User research
6 - Preparing and conducting user research
7 - Conduct low and high fidelity prototyping
8 - Quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods
9 - Descriptive statistics
10 - Ethics in research with human participants
11 - Communication of findings
12 - Team-based semester long project
13 - Real-world applications through guest lectures

Literature/Sources:

A. M. Cook, J. M. Polgar, P. Encarnação , 2020 , Assistive Technologies: Principles and Practice , Elsevier
K. Baxter, C. Courage, K. Caine , 2015 , Understanding your users - a practical guide for user research methods , Morgan & Kaufmann

Assesssment methods and criteria:

Classification Type: Quantitativa (0-20)

Evaluation Methodology:
The teaching methodologies are varied and based on 4 fundamental elements: Theory lectures, Practical work, Team work/exercises, Presentations. Additionally, the curricular unity is intended to have autonomous work from the students. During the curricular unity students will be taught and encouraged to discuss topics related with the syllabus and in relation to the theoretical and experimental work of their projects. Guest lectures will allow students to experience real case scenarios and the associated problems and solutions. The evaluation is composed by a number of assignments/presentations related to the life cycle of their projects, namely: Report/presentation on a specific target population - 20%; Mid-term project presentation - 20%; Final project report/presentation - 50%; Participation - 10%.