China
Africa
Explore chapters and articles related to this topic
Psychosocial and cultural aspects of rehabilitation engineering interventions
Published in Alex Mihailidis, Roger Smith, Rehabilitation Engineering, 2023
Marcia Scherer, Malcolm MacLachlan
Kaye et al. (2008) classified the technological sophistication of products as follows. High-tech products were digitally based, such as computer hardware or software, or a communication device. Medium-tech products were those with electronic or motorized equipment (for example, a powered wheelchair, scooter, or hearing aid). Low-tech products were non-motorized, non-electronic products, such as a magnifier, cane, or oxygen tank. One can argue with this classification in terms of the sophistication of technology versus the type of technology; and, as the authors note, these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. However, our interest here is to establish any relationship between different categories of technology use and ethnicity.
Sustainability in engineering design
Published in Riadh Habash, Green Engineering, 2017
Low-tech, accessible, local solutions offer an opportunity to address the poverty-ending objectives within the UN SDG for 2030. In order for development projects to be successful and sustainable, local communities should not be considered spectators in projects that are designed to help them. The main belief behind the low-tech, high-thinking movement is that it takes just as much creativity and skill to create inexpensive, simple solutions that may have a meaningful impact on a global scale. Understanding the systemic underlying causes, along with listening to and learning from the end-user, is a vital part of this design process (3P Contributer 2016).
Back to TA practice
Published in Armin Grunwald, Technology Assessment in Practice and Theory, 2018
Meeting the SDGs (UN 2015, Sect. 7.2) has to make use of technology in many fields. Often, this will not be advanced technology in the sense of industrialized countries but more “low-tech” solutions, well adapted to the respective local needs and circumstances. There is a huge task here waiting for TA (e.g., Nayono et al. 2016, Malik 2018).
Delivering epilepsy care in low-resource settings: the role of technology
Published in Expert Review of Medical Devices, 2021
Amza Ali, Diba Dindoust, Justin Grant, Dave Clarke
Technology may be inexpensive when low-tech and extremely expensive when high-tech but the really essential issue is not cost but cost-effectiveness. While full cost-benefit analyses cannot be easily done in the setting of health simply because it is difficult to put a price on human life, the metric of cost-effectiveness allows assessments of the cost of interventions that produce an improvement in a chosen biological metric eg seizure frequency. It identifies the least-cost way of achieving the objective, for example seizure freedom, to see how both the cost and choice of technique must vary as the magnitude of the objective changes in response to the interventions. The implications are profound as each local environment, and indeed even each individual for example with wearables must determine whether a proposed intervention is cost-effective to address a particular need, especially at a time in the world with so many competing health agendas [65].