Using Technology to Streamline Your Life After an Injury
Sustaining an injury can completely disrupt your daily life. From limited mobility to an inability to perform basic tasks, recovering while still maintaining your responsibilities is extremely challenging.
However, modern technology provides many different options to help streamline your life after an injury. With some smart implementations, you can drastically reduce frustrations and frustrations.
Mobility Assistance
One of the biggest impacts of an injury is reduced mobility. Simple actions like getting out of bed, going up stairs, or even moving short distances become difficult or impossible. Thankfully, there are various types of mobility aids that leverage technology to restore independence.
Motorized Wheelchairs
If walking is difficult or ruled out entirely, motorized wheelchairs grant freedom of movement. Unlike manual chairs, motorized options allow you to get around without needing to push yourself. This saves significant physical exertion while still letting you move on your own.
Most motorized wheelchairs have joystick or touchpad controls that are intuitive to operate. Modern variants even have "smart drive" collision detection to prevent accidents. With the ability to set varying top speeds, they make an excellent mobility aid during injury recovery. They are more expensive than manual variants but prices have dropped considerably in recent years.
Mobility Scooters
Similar to motorized wheelchairs, they are ideal if injury rehab prevents walking unaided. They offer weather protection and storage capacity lacking in wheelchairs via amenities like windshields, storage baskets, and cup holders.
Mobility scooters excel at stability thanks to their low center of gravity, making them great for those lacking balance control. Their steering wheels grant excellent maneuverability that wheelchairs cannot match. And like wheelchairs, they move via electric motors to avoid manual exertion.
If your injury rehabilitation involves improving balance and coordination, mobility scooters are a perfect transitional mobility aid. The only caveat is that they may be too bulky for extremely confined spaces, unlike more compact wheelchairs.
Walking Aids
If you maintain some mobility but require stability assistance, specialized walking aids leverage technology for user support. Options like smart canes and exoskeletons provide extensive walking stabilization that basic canes and walkers cannot provide.
Smart canes contain sophisticated motion sensors that detect imminent balance loss and counteract automatically via small stabilizer wheels. This results in dramatically improved safety during movement.
Exoskeletons take assistance even further by completely offloading body weight and joint strain. At their most advanced, full lower body exoskeletons essentially turn walking into a passive exercise while supporting total body weight. The latest models even interpret intended movement to walk and turn seamlessly via onboard computers. For those recovering from lower body injuries, exoskeleton walking aids take strain relief to levels impossible through manual means alone. They are expensive but restore high degrees of mobility.
Home Assistance
Assuming full mobility suddenly becomes an uncertainty after injury. Performing basic household tasks like cooking, cleaning and self-maintenance often involves some mobility. Thankfully, specialized assistive technology exists to bridge these newfound capability gaps.
Smart Home Automation
Leveraging integrated home electronics, smart home automation removes mobility barriers in common household tasks. Features like app-based remote lighting, large appliance control, and front door video intercoms mean you control your home environment from a phone or tablet without physical access needs. You manage thermostats, window shades, and most electrical devices straight from the bed if desired. Routine home needs become trivially simple despite mobility obstacles.
Smart home technology ranges from standalone app-based devices to fully integrated automation systems. With proper implementation, it alleviates mobility reliance in the vast majority of household situations. Home automation platforms continue advancing at a rapid pace with no signs of stopping. Their usage ease and affordability grow continually.
Speech Recognition Assistance
If you retain speech ability post-injury but not mobility, speech recognition assistants like Alexa, Google Home and Siri represent revolutionary help. They allow completely hands-off control of information lookup, communication, and basic device operation.
You can enjoy music, audiobooks, podcasts and more purely through vocal requests without any button pushing or display viewing. Special needs accessibility functions even support controlling room lighting, thermostats, and other assistive devices. Speech recognition assistance typically requires some generic smart home technology but setup is relatively simple.
With proper device and app integration, speech assistants supply extensive independence to those lacking mobility. Their voice recognition improves constantly via machine learning too. And so if you want a hands-off, mobility-free approach to household assistance, smart speakers offer huge potential.
Robotic Helpers
While less common than home automation or speech recognition assistants, custom household robots provide direct physical help with tasks otherwise prevented by injury limitation.
Robots like LG's CLOi GuideBot interface with smart home devices to autonomously control lighting, temperature, and appliance usage based on your vocal requests. Other assistants like Toyota's Human Support Robot retrieve objects, operate controls, open doors, etc via visual and mobility sensors combined with speech recognition. They represent direct stand-ins for typical household movement needs to accommodate mobility obstacles post-injury. While nascent and expensive, household robots grow more capable each year. Prices are beginning to fall too as commercial availability increases. For those desiring the most comprehensive mobile assistance post-injury, robots represent emerging and potentially revolutionary support unlikely realized through other solutions.
Communication Streamlining
Staying connected with family, friends, employers and others remains hugely important post-injury. However, communication barriers can arise depending on factors like hospitalization, mobility restrictions and accessibility loss due to computer use or phone manipulation. Thankfully, specialized software and devices exist to cleanly bridge these potential gaps.
Text to Speech Apps
If you retain hearing but not speaking post-injury, text-to-speech apps allow completely hands-free, autonomous voice communications from your smartphone or tablet. Options like SpeakIt and Voice Aloud Reader speak any onscreen text aloud based on highly customizable voices and languages. They integrate with other apps to read aloud social media posts, messages, emails, documents and virtually all types of text. Special accessibility features like face tracking cursors even enable completely hands-off screen navigation and typing.
If your injury prevents speech itself, text-to-speech apps supply a full speaking proxy straight from your existing touch devices. They also help proofread documents or other written materials using the voice readout if desired. With their expanding language support and speaking accuracy, text-to-speech apps deliver robust communication ability lacking personal speech.
Speech to Text Apps
Conversely, speech-to-text apps allow conversation, writing and content creation if injury impacts mobility instead. Through precise dictation capturing, options like Speechnotes, Google Docs Voice Typing and Dragon Anywhere format your spoken words into typed documents, messages, emails, search queries and more.
Speech-to-text technology grows more accurate each year thanks to machine learning upgrades. Some apps boast over 99% accuracy in optimal conditions. Full document creation and editing are possible without any typing or manual input. If mobility loss affects typing ability post-injury, dictation apps restore extensive communication capacity and more. They interface with smartphones and tablets to transform them into speech-capturing devices.
Health Tracking Assistance
Rigorous health tracking represents paramount importance while recovering post-injury. However, factors like memory issues, attention divides or simple mobility limitations can make regular monitoring adherence difficult. Luckily, specialized health tracking technology exists to automate much of this crucial measurement process.
Vital Tracking Smartwatches
If injury complications make routine pulse, temperature or respiratory tracking important, smartwatches automate the entire vital sign process seamlessly.
Models like the Apple Watch Series 8 or Fitbit Sense contain comprehensive body sensors measuring key health metrics completely autonomously every few seconds. Heart rate, blood oxygen levels, sleep patterns, hourly movement and dozens of additional statistics all populate directly onto your wrist without any effort.
Medication Reminder Apps
Rigorous medicine adherence proves vital for productive injury rehabilitation and pain reduction. However, remembering variably timed dosage schedules amidst life complications poses huge obstacles.
Fortunately, medication reminder apps like My Therapist and Round Health exist to fully automate dosage alerts straight to your devices. You input your personal medication listings with custom schedules, doses and usage instructions. Apps then curate optimized alerts so your devices signal upcoming medicine events.
More advanced integrations even support electronic pill dispensers triggered directly by phone apps automatically. Set up medication reminder apps the moment an injury occurs to maximize productive recovery odds through timely medicine adherence. And let technology shoulder the responsibility so focusing energy towards healing.
Professional Assistance
Even leveraging full technology assistance, severe injury cases spike demand across nearly every aspect of daily life temporarily. Seeking professional medical and legal assistance is perfectly reasonable needing extensive life reshaping. Thankfully, options exist alleviating many common burdens through trying rehabilitation periods.
Home Health Aides
If personal care, household upkeep and general watchful assistance grows necessary, specialized home health aides offer huge relief when family or friends cannot suffice.
Unlike independence loss in nursing homes, home health aides residually move into patient houses directly. They provide comprehensive assistance like personal hygiene help, meal preparation, medication administration and medical transport aid while allowing patients to recover comfortably from home itself.
Telemedicine
If injuries prevent a person from leaving their home but in-person doctor evaluations remain necessary, telemedicine video visits bridge the gap.
Online telemedicine platforms link patients directly with registered doctors, physicians, specialists and therapists for diagnosis consultations, prescription fulfillment, treatment evaluations, etc using live video chat. These remote check-ins avoid total separation from healthcare guidance when seeing doctors in person grows difficult.
Legal Consultations
In unfortunate injury cases caused by others' negligence or liability like car accidents, discussing potential legal action becomes necessary. However, meeting attorneys physically poses clear challenges especially when still actively recovering.
Thankfully, reputable legal firms offer comprehensive initial case consultations virtually using teleconferencing and cloud file sharing. This allows victims to explore their legal options – for example, it can make it easy for you to find out if you can sue for a burn injury or any other type of injury. It also allows for conveying all relevant documentation like medical charts, accounting records and evidence documents remotely rather than in-person meetings initially.
By embracing specialized technology purpose-built for accessibility and convenience, life disruption from serious injuries has reduced dramatically compared to even 5-10 years ago.