Assistive Technology for People with Visual Impairment: an analysis of technological production in Brazil

Abstract

The absence of vision influences the performance of daily activities such as reading a book, walking on the street or surfing the Internet. To execute such activities, people with visual impairment use Assistive Technologies (AT), which are products, services or environments that has as objective the improvement of functional capabilities and the integration of their users. With the purpose of finding the existent technologies and the growing technological evolution in this area, this study carried out an analyses of the national panorama of innovation of AT for visually impaired people,. The methodology was based on a patents requests research at the National Institute of Industrial Property, using the keywords "assistive technologies", "technical help", "visual impairment", "visually impaired", "blind", "blindness", "low vision" (in Portuguese), during the months of July and August of  2017. The results indicate that the national production of industrial property about AT for people with visual impairment is still limited, with focus on, mainly, mobility, orientation and scholar inclusion; and with concentration of production in the Southeast and South regions. Besides that, it was also observed that the use of the term Assistive Technology is not widespread in Brazil yet.