There is disproportionate representation of individuals with disabilities involved in the criminal justice system. Individuals with disabilities that have experienced incarceration present unique needs to navigating the vocational rehabilitation process. Through the Vocational Rehabilitation Technical Assistance Center for Quality Employment (VRTAC-QE), a learning community was formed to create a toolkit addressing these needs. Using a person-centered lens, this toolkit provides practical tips, tools, and resources for addressing effective services of justice-impacted individuals with disabilities.
Background: The value of diversity in human resources, particularly empowering employees with disabilities as assets, has been investigated by industry. Even in an era of economic expansion, the existence of workers with disabilities, particularly those with autism, is stigmatised.
Objectives: This study aimed to understand how employees with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) adjust their work and how their employers view their performance.
Method: Mixed method design is the method used in this study. By purposive sampling, three employees with ASD were chosen as the main subjects, and their degree of job adjustment was assessed using the Work Adjustment Illinois Scale (WAIS). Three employers were also interviewed in depth to get qualitative data. Validity, reliability and normality checks were all part of quantitative analysis. Work Adjustment Illinois Scale scores are also categorised using a statistical method (mean ± standard deviation) before qualitative analysis is performed using the interactive analysis method.
Results: The results show that the majority of workers with ASD exhibited moderate to high degrees of work adjustment. Self-confidence, the necessity of structural modification, and the significance of employer comprehension were among the themes that surfaced from the processing of the qualitative data.
Conclusion: Workers with ASD are able to make good work adjustments when facilitated with work adjustments from both the individual themselves and support from their workplace.
Contribution: In order to support the continued professional success of people with ASD, the study highlights the necessity of inclusive work rules and training for supervisors and coworkers to support the wellbeing of workers with autism.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities, Communities. Classes. Races
Alejandro De la Hoz, Ester Ceballos, Javier Cubero
In recent decades, technological advances have fostered new therapeutic approaches for children with neurodevelopmental disorders, particularly Autism Spectrum Disorder. Educational robotics has emerged as a promising resource for acquiring social skills, recognizing emotions, and developing theory of mind. However, there is still a need to understand which dimensions are most susceptible to this specific intervention and how its impact differs based on individual profiles. This study analyzes the effect of a therapeutic intervention based on Educational Robotics on Social Skills, Emotional Recognition, and Theory of Mind in two students diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The intervention was structured in seven sessions using the ANDY<sup>®</sup> kit. Tests from the NEPSY-II battery and an observational rubric of Social Skills recorded session by session were applied. Both participants showed significant improvements in Social Skills, especially in <i>rules of courtesy</i>, <i>nonverbal communication</i>, and <i>conversational interaction</i>. Regarding Emotional Recognition, one participant improved in identifying highly affective emotions, while the other showed more modest progress. Theory of Mind showed progress in only one of the participants. Adherence was high, although a slight decrease in motivation was identified in the last sessions. These results suggest that Educational Robotics, when applied within a structured therapeutic framework, can effectively foster socioemotional development in children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. However, variability across domains highlights the importance of tailoring interventions to individual profiles and complementing them with strategies that support the transfer of learning to natural contexts.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities
Abstract Purpose This study investigates the vocational recovery and return-to-work (RTW) experiences of individuals with common mental disorders (CMDs) within disability-based insurance systems, assessing alignment with the Connectedness, Hope, Identity, Meaning, and Empowerment (CHIME) model. ‘Disability-based’ refers to systems where eligibility depends on the presence of a health condition regardless of its cause, operating through social insurance in European countries and life insurance in Australia. Methods Through a qualitative scoping review under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA-ScR) framework we reviewed qualitative peer-reviewed studies on RTW for people with CMDs from five electronic databases and mapped findings to CHIME dimensions noting unclassifiable content. Results Analysis of 11 studies revealed complex RTW processes for individuals with CMDs within disability-based insurance systems, emphasising the importance of CHIME dimensions. Key findings identified the necessity of supportive relationships and structured rehabilitation services for successful vocational recovery. Conclusion Results identify the need for a recovery-oriented approach in occupational rehabilitation for individuals with CMDs. This emphasises the importance of supportive environments that foster empowerment, meaningful engagement, and identity reconstruction in the RTW process. Further research should explore these aspects within the Australian context to develop more effective person-centred rehabilitation models. IMPLICATIONS FOR REHABILITATION Rehabilitation professionals should prioritise mental health literacy training for supervisors and implement flexible policies that facilitate successful return to work for individuals with Common Mental Disorders. Vocational rehabilitation programs should integrate the Connectedness, Hope, Identity, Meaning, Empowerment (CHIME) recovery model with occupational strategies to address mental health and employment needs of individuals accessing disability insurance systems. Rehabilitation providers should develop individualised intervention plans that account for the specific challenges, recovery stages, and occupational contexts of each person with a Common Mental Disorder. Service providers should establish structured collaboration between healthcare providers, employers, and peer support networks to ensure comprehensive rehabilitation support throughout the Return to Work journey.
The aim of this study was to explore the perceived relationship between inclusion and participation in social and physical activities for people with physical disabilities. In partnership with a local disability-focused non-profit organization, we completed semi-structured interviews with 12 individuals with physical disabilities. Interview transcripts were analysed using an inductive thematic approach considering the social–ecological model and quality participation framework for people with disabilities. We developed three themes to describe the relationship between inclusion and participation in social and physical activities: physical accessibility of spaces and places, advocates are needed to share knowledge, and social inclusion and social/physical activities influence each other. Participants discussed the facilitating role of social inclusion on physical and social activities and the bi-directional relationship between inclusion and community participation. Fostering social inclusion through increased accessibility, education, and awareness at the community or program level can facilitate full community participation for people with physical disabilities.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities
Joanne Mampaso-Desbrow, Margarita Alonso-Criado, María Dolores López-Salmerón
et al.
As digital technologies become increasingly integrated into daily life, individuals with intellectual disabilities face both opportunities and risks in virtual environments. Despite widespread internet access and frequent use of digital devices among the general population, many individuals with disabilities continue to experience significant barriers to digital participation. These include difficulties in using technological tools, limited access to devices at home, and challenges in navigating online environments safely and independently. This study investigates the cybersecurity knowledge, risk perception, and privacy practices of 28 university students with mild intellectual disabilities in Spain. Utilizing a validated, accessible self-assessment questionnaire, the research analyzes participants’ understanding of digital threats, self-protective behaviors, and gender-based differences in knowledge and decision-making. Results reveal a generally high awareness of online risks and appropriate use of privacy settings, though inconsistencies in password security and high social media usage persist. Female participants demonstrated slightly higher levels of theoretical knowledge. The findings underscore the urgent need for inclusive, accessible cybersecurity education tailored to cognitive diversity. Promoting digital autonomy and safety through targeted interventions can reduce the digital divide and foster full social participation. This research contributes to the broader discourse on digital inclusion and protection for individuals with disabilities in an increasingly connected world.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities
Individualized training improved post-stroke motor function rehabilitation efficiency. However, the mechanisms of how individualized training facilitates recovery is not clear. This study explored the cortical and corticomuscular rehabilitative effects in post-stroke motor function recovery during individualized training. Sprague-Dawley rats with intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) were randomly distributed into two groups: forced training (FOR-T, n=13) and individualized fatigue-controlled training (FAT-C, n=13) to receive training respectively from day 2 to day 14 post-stroke. The FAT-C group exhibited superior motor function recovery and less central fatigue compared to the FOR-T group. EEG PSD slope analysis demonstrated a better inter-hemispheric balance in FAT-C group compare to the FOR-T group. The dCMC analysis indicated that training-induced fatigue led to a short-term down-regulation of descending corticomuscular coherence (dCMC) and an up-regulation of ascending dCMC. In the long term, excessive fatigue hindered the recovery of descending control in the affected hemisphere. The individualized strategy of peripheral fatigue-controlled training achieved better motor function recovery, which could be attributed to the mitigation of central fatigue, optimization of inter-hemispheric balance and enhancement of descending control in the affected hemisphere.
Masaki Kuribayashi, Kohei Uehara, Allan Wang
et al.
Blind people have limited opportunities to explore an environment based on their interests. While existing navigation systems could provide them with surrounding information while navigating, they have limited scalability as they require preparing prebuilt maps. Thus, to develop a map-less robot that assists blind people in exploring, we first conducted a study with ten blind participants at a shopping mall and science museum to investigate the requirements of the system, which revealed the need for three levels of detail to describe the surroundings based on users' preferences. Then, we developed WanderGuide, with functionalities that allow users to adjust the level of detail in descriptions and verbally interact with the system to ask questions about the environment or to go to points of interest. The study with five blind participants revealed that WanderGuide could provide blind people with the enjoyable experience of wandering around without a specific destination in their minds.
Accessing visual information is crucial yet challenging for people with low vision due to visual conditions like low visual acuity and limited visual fields. However, unlike blind people, low vision people have and prefer using their functional vision in daily tasks. Gaze patterns thus become an important indicator to uncover their visual challenges and intents, inspiring more adaptive visual support. We seek to deeply understand low vision users' gaze behaviors in different image-viewing tasks, characterizing typical visual intents and the unique gaze patterns exhibited by people with different low vision conditions. We conducted a retrospective think-aloud study using eye tracking with 20 low vision participants and 20 sighted controls. Participants completed various image-viewing tasks and watched the playback of their gaze trajectories to reflect on their visual experiences. Based on the study, we derived a visual intent taxonomy with five visual intents characterized by participants' gaze behaviors. We demonstrated the difference between low vision and sighted participants' gaze behaviors and how visual ability affected low vision participants' gaze patterns across visual intents. Our findings underscore the importance of combining visual ability information, visual context, and eye tracking data in visual intent recognition, setting up a foundation for intent-aware assistive technologies for low vision people.
Samaneh Sardary, Farhad Tabatabai Ghomsheh, Hamid Reza Norouzi
et al.
Objectives: To comprehend the kinematic effects of hallux valgus (HV) deformity on young and older people, we assessed the angular acceleration of the joints in the lower limbs of these women.
Methods: Forty-eight women in two groups, young adults (20-30 years old) and older adults (50-60 years old), participated in this study (12 healthy and 12 with HV). We used an inertial measurement unit (IMU)-based motion capture system to measure the kinematics of motion. Biomechanical variables were assessed at an ideal speed during gait (stance and swing phases). All modules were calibrated in advance and then attached to the right thigh, shank, and foot.
Results: The results showed that in the young group, angular acceleration was significantly different during gait in all planes of the ankle joint, the sagittal plane of the knee joint, and the horizontal and frontal planes of the hip joint. In the older group, it was significantly different in the sagittal plane of the ankle and knee and the sagittal and frontal planes of the hip joint.
Discussion: It appears that the angular acceleration of the lower limb joints was affected by HV, especially in the young group. Additionally, the angular acceleration of the knee joint was less affected in both groups.
Medicine, Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities
Introduction: Accepting the levels of professionalism that are currently in place not only provides a baseline for promoting development through educational and professional growth approaches, but also helps to make improved professionalisation possible by focusing on individual and professional-related factors. The objective of the current study in my thesis was to evaluate the professionalism and guiding principles of the physical therapists at RCRS, Lahore.
Objective: to assess the professionalism of candidates pursuing a postgraduate degree in physical therapy.
Methodology: A cross-sectional investigation was conducted. Before taking part in the study, each participant signed a written informed consent form. Data were gathered using a closed-ended professionalism rating questionnaire. 50 postgraduate students from Riphah International University's Lahore campus were included in the sample..
Results: The average age of the participants in the study was 24.0600 (SD±.956). Honesty and Integrity 82% of participants (n=41) Reliability and Responsibility 74% of participants (n=37) Respect for Patients 86% of participants (n=43) Respect for Others 72% of participants (n=36) Attendance and Approach to Learning 60% of participants (n=30) Compassion and Empathy 68% of participants (n=34) Communication and Collaboration 68% of participants (n=34) Self Awareness and Knowledge of Limits 56% of participants (n=28) Altruism and Advocacy 76% of participants (n=38) Health 86% of participants (n=43)
Conclusion: It was concluded that an overall levels of professionalism among post graduate students of physical therapists were unsatisfactory.
Vocational rehabilitation. Employment of people with disabilities, Therapeutics. Psychotherapy
Understanding and predicting people flow in urban areas is useful for decision-making in urban planning and marketing strategies. Traditional methods for understanding people flow can be divided into measurement-based approaches and simulation-based approaches. Measurement-based approaches have the advantage of directly capturing actual people flow, but they face the challenge of data imperfection. On the other hand, simulations can obtain complete data on a computer, but they only consider some of the factors determining human behavior, leading to a divergence from actual people flow. Both measurement and simulation methods have unresolved issues, and combining the two can complementarily overcome them. This paper proposes a method that applies data assimilation, a fusion technique of measurement and simulation, to agent-based simulation. Data assimilation combines the advantages of both measurement and simulation, contributing to the creation of an environment that can reflect real people flow while acquiring richer data. The paper verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method in a virtual environment and demonstrates the potential of data assimilation to compensate for the three types of imperfection in people flow measurement techniques. These findings can serve as guidelines for supplementing sparse measurement data in physical environments.
Social science research has shown that candidates with names indicative of certain races or genders often face discrimination in employment practices. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated racial and gender biases in various applications. In this study, we utilize GPT-3.5-Turbo and Llama 3-70B-Instruct to simulate hiring decisions and salary recommendations for candidates with 320 first names that strongly signal their race and gender, across over 750,000 prompts. Our empirical results indicate a preference among these models for hiring candidates with White female-sounding names over other demographic groups across 40 occupations. Additionally, even among candidates with identical qualifications, salary recommendations vary by as much as 5% between different subgroups. A comparison with real-world labor data reveals inconsistent alignment with U.S. labor market characteristics, underscoring the necessity of risk investigation of LLM-powered systems.
The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has consistently focused on the experiences of users moderated by social media platforms. Recently, scholars have noticed that moderation practices could perpetuate biases, resulting in the marginalization of user groups undergoing moderation. However, most studies have primarily addressed marginalization related to issues such as racism or sexism, with little attention given to the experiences of people with disabilities. In this paper, we present a study on the moderation experiences of blind users on TikTok, also known as "BlindToker," to address this gap. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 BlindTokers and used thematic analysis to analyze the data. Two main themes emerged: BlindTokers' situated content moderation experiences and their reactions to content moderation. We reported on the lack of accessibility on TikTok's platform, contributing to the moderation and marginalization of BlindTokers. Additionally, we discovered instances of harassment from trolls that prompted BlindTokers to respond with harsh language, triggering further moderation. We discussed these findings in the context of the literature on moderation, marginalization, and transformative justice, seeking solutions to address such issues.
We have undertaken a mixed-methods study of fiction writers' experiences and attitudes with generative AI, primarily focused on the experiences of queer and disabled writers. We find that queer and disabled writers are markedly more pessimistic than non-queer and non-disabled writers about the impact of AI on their industry, although pessimism is the majority attitude for both groups. We explore ways that generative AI exacerbates existing sources of instability and precarity in the publishing industry, reasons why writers are philosophically opposed to its use, and individual and collective strategies used by marginalized fiction writers to safeguard their industry from harms associated with generative AI.
Recent research proposed gaze-assisted gestures to enhance interaction within virtual reality (VR), providing opportunities for people with motor impairments to experience VR. Compared to people with other motor impairments, those with Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA) exhibit enhanced distal limb mobility, providing them with more design space. However, it remains unknown what gaze-assisted upper-body gestures people with SMA would want and be able to perform. We conducted an elicitation study in which 12 VR-experienced people with SMA designed upper-body gestures for 26 VR commands, and collected 312 user-defined gestures. Participants predominantly favored creating gestures with their hands. The type of tasks and participants' abilities influence their choice of body parts for gesture design. Participants tended to enhance their body involvement and preferred gestures that required minimal physical effort, and were aesthetically pleasing. Our research will contribute to creating better gesture-based input methods for people with motor impairments to interact with VR.
Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can cause harm to people. This research examines how individuals react to such harm through the lens of blame. Building upon research suggesting that people blame AI systems, we investigated how several factors influence people's reactive attitudes towards machines, designers, and users. The results of three studies (N = 1,153) indicate differences in how blame is attributed to these actors. Whether AI systems were explainable did not impact blame directed at them, their developers, and their users. Considerations about fairness and harmfulness increased blame towards designers and users but had little to no effect on judgments of AI systems. Instead, what determined people's reactive attitudes towards machines was whether people thought blaming them would be a suitable response to algorithmic harm. We discuss implications, such as how future decisions about including AI systems in the social and moral spheres will shape laypeople's reactions to AI-caused harm.
Lorenzo Vianello, Emek Barış Küçüktabak, Matthew Short
et al.
Sit-to-Stand (StS) is a fundamental daily activity that can be challenging for stroke survivors due to strength, motor control, and proprioception deficits in their lower limbs. Existing therapies involve repetitive StS exercises, but these can be physically demanding for therapists while assistive devices may limit patient participation and hinder motor learning. To address these challenges, this work proposes the use of two lower-limb exoskeletons to mediate physical interaction between therapists and patients during a StS rehabilitative task. This approach offers several advantages, including improved therapist-patient interaction, safety enforcement, and performance quantification. The whole body control of the two exoskeletons transmits online feedback between the two users, but at the same time assists in movement and ensures balance, and thus helping subjects with greater difficulty. In this study we present the architecture of the framework, presenting and discussing some technical choices made in the design.
David Latortue, Moetez Kdayem, Fidel A Guerrero Peña
et al.
Object detection models are commonly used for people counting (and localization) in many applications but require a dataset with costly bounding box annotations for training. Given the importance of privacy in people counting, these models rely more and more on infrared images, making the task even harder. In this paper, we explore how weaker levels of supervision can affect the performance of deep person counting architectures for image classification and point-level localization. Our experiments indicate that counting people using a CNN Image-Level model achieves competitive results with YOLO detectors and point-level models, yet provides a higher frame rate and a similar amount of model parameters.
People sometimes change their opinions when they discuss things with other people. Researchers can use mathematics to study opinion changes in simplifications of real-life situations. These simplified settings, which are examples of mathematical models, help researchers explore how people influence each other through their social interactions. In today's digital world, these models can help us learn how to promote the spread of accurate information and reduce the spread of inaccurate information. In this article, we discuss a simple mathematical model of opinion changes that arise from social interactions. We briefly describe what such opinion models can tell us and how researchers try to make them more realistic.