Assistive Technologies for Severe Spinal Cord Injured Individuals: A Survey

Spinal cord injured (SCI) individuals are often deprived from computer access and subsequent control and communication abilities. Their motor skills loss often translates in the inability to operate traditional inputs like the keyboard and mouse pointer devices. Moreover, with the enormous technology evolution in the last few years, our lifes, control and communication depend increasingly on gadgets (i.e., mobile devices). More than just leisure, jobs depend on those technologies. This technological evolution, contrary to what could be expected, has enlarged the damp between disabled and fully-capable individuals and indirectly reduced their life quality. In the past decades several approaches have been made to overcome this problem and re-approach SCI patients to computers or any other electronic device. In this report we review the major approaches to assistive technologies considering spinal cord injure