Background
People living with disabilities can have a hard time finding and keeping a job. Emerging technologies have the potential to lead to more inclusive employment and improve job satisfaction. But to be effective, these technologies must be designed with and for the people who use them and be evaluated in real life circumstances. Lessons from such evaluations need to be made productive for system transformation to help foster inclusive employment practices.
Objectives
The reflexive evaluation of the Coalition for Technology and Inclusion is a transdisciplinary research project funded by the Employee Insurance Agency of the Netherlands (UWV) who asked the Athena Institute to explore the transformative potential of technologies in the workplace for the users and their colleagues. To explore this transformative potential, cases studied included :
- Use of the Lavo Exoskeleton for production line workers at a local factory. The Lavo is a wearable technology that mechanically supports users who do physically demanding work. It improves postural movement to prevent or relieve lower back pain and improve their quality of life.
- The Ebb app was developed to empower factory and warehouse workers that have difficulty communicating or weak verbal skills. It aids users to easily build an archive of images and photos that reflect who they are and can provide visual aids to support their verbal communication.
- The Speaksee device, tested by the Dutch national police, aims to assist deaf or hard of hearing employees to effectively participate in workplace conversations and meetings. The device combines microphones and an app to transcribe speech to text in real time. The goal of the project was to highlight users’ experiences with different types of technologies and identify points of interest to consider when designing technologies for inclusive employment of people with disabilities.
Approach
The project explored the transformative possibilities of emerging technologies and highlighted the ways that these technologies can be interpreted by different stakeholders in the work environment. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and transformation-oriented methods were employed to understand the lived experiences of stakeholders within the cultures and contexts of each case. With this information the technologies were further adjusted to realise their intended roles and/or the work culture was modified to enable greater inclusivity of people with disabilities.