Intelligent systems and disability-the research challenge

Intelligent systems have great potential to assist disabled people and improve the quality of their lives. This paper describes some of the ways in which disabled people can benefit from the application of intelligent systems, and some currently active areas of research. There is a very wide range of demanding problems to be tackled in developing intelligent systems for disabled people, many of which require multi-disciplinary research and development. In the design of such systems, tasks must be apportioned optimally between user and machine in order to maximise the overall efficacy of the user/machine partnership. This is especially important in systems for disabled people, where users may have to rely on very limited residual abilities in order to control the systems which assist them