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Assistive technology (AT) is any item, device, software, or product system used to enhance, maintain, or improve the functional abilities of people with disabilities. There are many people with disabilities in the world, including the visually impaired, the hearing impaired, and the physically impaired. We established the National KOSEN Support Equipment Development Network (KOSEN-AT) with technical college faculty members 10 years ago to assist these disabled and elderly people. However, Japan is facing the challenge of a rapidly aging society, and the digital transformation of assistive device development for people with disabilities has not been adequately addressed. A major reason for this is the lack of engineers in Japan who can develop products with an understanding of the needs of people with disabilities and the elderly. In this paper, we describe a new initiative of the GEAR 5.0 program, a practical engineer education program that will enable the development of assistive devices for the physically challenged and the elderly, which started in 2020 at the National Institute of Technology in Japan. We believe that it is necessary to educate technicians not only with conventional specialized skills, but also with a full understanding of the concept of disability and basic skills in assistive technology. Next, we developed "Touch Talker", a digital text reading system for the visually impaired. As a part of the GEAR 5.0 program, we conducted an evaluation experiment in which students from a technical college experienced visual impairment in the same blindfolded environment as visually impaired people to evaluate the developed assistive device. To verify its importance, we developed a digital text-to-speech system for the visually impaired, "Touch Talker", as part of the GEAR 5.0 program. We thought that by conducting evaluation experiments in the same blindfolded environment as visually impaired people, we could make technical college students aware of the difficulties of operating digital devices due to visual impairment. The results of the experiment showed that the developed "Touch Talker" was effective for both the visually impaired group and the blindfolded technical college student group. The evaluation results also showed a similar trend, confirming that the evaluation by blindfolded technical college students is effective for the development of assistive devices for the visually impaired. In addition, the technical college students who participated in the evaluation experiment were able to understand the difficulty of operating digital devices by experiencing visual impairment. It was suggested that the perspective of the people involved is important in the development of assistive devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this study, an online survey was conducted to discover the preferences of older adults when they used sensors in their households, rather than the preferences of the researchers who developed them. The sample size was 400 Japanese community-dwelling people aged 65 years and older. The numbers of samples for men and women, household composition (single-person/couple-only household), and younger senior (younger than 74 years old) and older senior (older than 75 years old) were equally assigned. The survey results showed that "informational security" and "constancy of life" were considered more important than other factors when installing sensors. Furthermore, looking at the results regarding the type of sensors that face resistance, we found that both cameras and microphones were evaluated as facing slightly strong resistance, while doors/windows, temperature/humidity, CO2/gas/smoke, and water flow were evaluated as not facing such strong resistance. The elderly who are likely to need sensors in the future also have various attributes, and the introduction of ambient sensors in elderly households may be further advanced by recommending applications that are easy to introduce based on the attributes of the target population, rather than discussing all of them in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]