Rehabilitation engineering—a developing specialty

Recent estimates made by the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Swedish Institute for the Handicapped (National Research Council, 1976) indicate that between 10 and 12 per cent of the population are handicapped. Using the lower figure and estimating on the conservative side means that there are approximately 20 million handicapped individuals in the United States. The SSA figure also indicates that about 8 million-are able to work either normally or in a limited capacity and 74 million are unable to work at all. By deduction, the remaining 44 million must be comprised of those from the young and geriatric populations. The loss of productivity plus the financial burden borne by federal and state programmes are estimated to be in the billions of dollars. Of course, these financial burdens are in addition to personal losses suffered by physically handicapped individuals resulting from their inability to participate in many aspects of life-losses that cannot be measured in dollars. A conservative estimate is that technology can be potentially beneficial to at least 50 per cent of the physically handicapped population (10 million people in the United States). Prosthetics and orthotics have been the primary source of technology for physically handicapped over the years. Recent studies conducted by the Committee on Prosthetics Research and Development-National Academy of Sciences (le Blanc, 1973) indicate that approximately 4 million individuals benefit directly from prosthetic and orthotic services. This means that a remaining 6 million individuals stand to benefit from additional types of technology that are presently unavailable to them. Recent experience with this latter population indicates that judicious application of tech-