Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Monday, June 1, 2009

Is the Wii Really Good for Your Health?

Is the Wii Really Good for Your Health?

Assistive Technologies


https://www.star-educational.co.nz/view_products.php?cat=4

As cited in Cook & Hussey (2000) the definition of an assistive technology device is: "any item, piece of equipment or product system whether acquired commercially off the shelf modified, or customized that is used to increase or improve functional capabilities of individuals with disabilities."

Above is an example of a piece of assistive technology. This is called a wobble switch. It is about half a meter in size. It is used for clients who lack fine motor skills but have gross motor skills. Mostly the switch can be operated with the hand, but a knee or a foot can be used alternatively. The cost of this piece of equipment is $250.00.

The device may be attached to many different surfaces, for example a table or a wheel chair. If the client has gross motor skills the switch can be linked to any number of appliances thus making it possible for the person to participate in many forms of occupation.

Digital Camera use and application.

"A new technology is rarely superior to an old one in every feature".
This saying is quite true of digital cameras. The beauty of digital cameras is that you can take a lot of pictures of the same thing and choose the best one for no extra cost. You can delete any unfocused or unflattering shots; however, the trouble seems to be that we accumulate an awful amount of pictures and they are often stored insecuely. We rely heavily on the computer to look after them for us with no back up. What happens when the computer is broken or stolen? We lose all that information. There is something very nostalgic about looking through old photographs, the hard copies, and no power is required.

Digital images can be easily emailed to other people or put on the internet eg flickr. They can be stored on USB sticks or even on notebooks. They can be sent via telephone also.

With such a fast means of transferring information though, there could be some issues of images being published without the people in them knowing or wanting them to go public.

Digital images are useful for showing what particular items are. In an occupational therapy seeting a prime example would be to view equipment.eg www.especialneeds.com

Find out about services offered by Flickr here. folloe the link.
www.m2review.com/share-photos-on-flickr.html

Here is another alternative to Flickr...
www.astahost.com/info.php/Free-Photo-Storage-Sites_t8631.html

Most cameras have both optical zoom and digital zoom. Optical zoom works just like a zoom lens on a film camera. The lens changes focal length and magnification as it is zoomed. Image quality stays high throughout the zoom range. Digital zoom simply crops the image to a smaller size, then enlarges the cropped portion to fill the frame again. Digital zoom results in a significant loss of quality as is clear from the examples below. It's pretty much a last resort, and if you don't have it in camera, you can do a similar job using almost any image editing program.

Put simply, Digital zoom expands images while optical zoom magnifies before picture taken.

What is a Megapixal?
A megapixel (MP) is 1 million pixels, and is a term used not only for the number of pixels in an image, but also to express the number of image sensor elements of digital cameras or the number of display elements of digital displays. For example, a camera with an array of 2048×1536 sensor elements is commonly said to have "3.1 megapixels" (2048 × 1536 = 3,145,728). The neologism sensel is sometimes used to describe the elements of a digital camera's sensor, since these are picture-detecting rather than picture-producing elements.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megapixel#Megapixel Retrieved 11.58am 02/06/09

Retro Surfing

This is what some people I know get up to in Dunedin!