About Us

We envisage a centre for comprehensive regional leadership in disability rehabilitation through assistive technology. The centre is envisaged as more than an isolated lab for innovation, research and development. In order to create and demonstrate a measurable and lasting impact on disability rehabilitation in the region, the centre would need undertake a variety of functions stretching across the disability-rehabilitation value-chain:

 

Comprehensive Research

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• Initial and on-going landscape and stakeholder analysis to identify unmet needs and promising resources:

• A comprehensive landscape research and analysis of gaps in the disability rehabilitation domain, with a special focus the status of assistive technologies, their availability, quality, accessibility, key barriers to access and optimal uptake and utilization – thus identifying the most pressing unmet needs. This is in addition to identifying, investigating, documenting, publishing and promoting case studies of successful assistive technologies that have created impact or promise to create impact

• Research-based identification of priority areas for further work - sensory/ cognitive/ motor disability. Enhancing the quality and accessibility of existing essential devices versus a focus on innovation of new innovative ones.

• Compilation and publication of above knowledge to enable researchers globally to better understand disability landscapes in South Asia and to aid further work in disability rehabilitation – at policy, research, development and dissemination levels. To build and make publicly accessible a repository of information on rehabilitation options and assistive technologies available.

• The latter shall be one step toward eliminating the knowledge gap as a barrier to access. Other activities will be required to fully bridge the barriers to access related to knowledge and usage skill.

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    Policy, advocacy, standardization and technical support

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• Design and advocacy for policy interventions based on comprehensive multi-stakeholder domain research

• Standards: Technical support to Indian and (other  South Asian Governments) in design and implementation of standards for assistive technology

• To identify gaps in the design and manufacture and availability of essential assistive devices

• To provide technical guidance and R&D support to manufacturers to enable production and availability of high quality, reliable and affordable assistive devices to populations in need.

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    Fostering partnerships and ecosystem strengthening

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• To build an end-to-end consortium of stakeholders across the disability rehabilitation value chain to further strategic objectives

• To leverage end-to-end cross-disciplinary partnerships for the invention, development, commercialization, dissemination, uptake and impact-scaling of novel assistive technology devices to ensure and document measurable social impact

 

    Technology development and business model innovation

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• To undertake research and development of novel affordable, assistive devices for the South Asian and global context

• To undertake business model innovation for the delivery of assistive devices to populations in need in a meaningful, impactful sustainable and scalable fashion.

• Modes of Assistive Technology Innovation​

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Intramurally by recruiting Innovation Fellows each year. The fellows will ‘learn by doing’ innovation of Assistive products.

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• Scholars across multiple leading institutions, for example B.Tech, BPT, M.tech, MPT, MPH, MSW, PhD, M.Phil and Post Doc scholars working to develop or investigate assistive technologies shall be funded supported. The centre shall facilitate partnerships required to bring research work from lab to life.

• Companies working on assistive products shall be evaluated, selected, funded and incubated intramurally

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    Education and creation of leaders

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• To bring together into teams - professionals from diverse backgrounds - and create leaders in the field of disability rehabilitation and assistive technologies. Fellows may come from backgrounds such as Public Policy, Public Health, Social work, the NGO Sector, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Physical and Occupational Therapy, Biomedical Engineering and other allied fields.

• To support the development and refinement of curricula at institutions that offer courses in disability rehabilitation and assistive technologies.

 

    Unique impact focus

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• ­The school of International Biodesign at AIIMS and the Centre for Disability at IIT Delhi have distinguished themselves through their PEOPLE centred approach as opposed to RESEARCH focus of academia and PRODUCT  focus of industry. The centre shall have this human centred, impact focused and measurement-oriented approach to its work.