Assistive Technology Service Delivery Outcome Assessment: From Challenges to Standards

This entry provides an introduction to the key elements necessary to understand the issues related to assistive technology (AT) service delivery outcome assessment. Focusing mainly on work conducted in English-speaking countries (i.e., USA, Australia) and Europe, the ambition of this chapter is not to comprehensively review the extant literature on this multifaceted topic, but to provide an introduction to its key elements that might be accessible to a wider readership. The entry first introduces the reader to the concepts of AT service delivery and outcome assessment. It goes on to illustrate some of the main reasons or challenges that have hindered the AT field from achieving consensus on what should be considered an outcome and how to adequately measure it. It then presents relevant contributions that attempt to model the outcome assessment process and identify key indicators for its measurement. The role of the AT user in any assessment process is discussed in light of a rights-based approach to AT service delivery. The entry lastly focuses on recent proposals to standardize the outcome assessment process in order to achieve a global consensus on the need to collect reliable data on the effectiveness of AT service delivery processes worldwide.