Designing Autonomy at Home. The ADA Project. An Interdisciplinary Strategy for Adaptation of the Homes of Disabled Persons

Housing adaptations are one of the main tools for improving quality of life for people with severe disabilities and for their caregivers. They are also the main tool of the ADA Project, an action research that developed a strategy to tailor adaptations to the specific user needs and profiles. After an introduction to disability, accessibility and housing adaptations, the book describes the ADA Project’s goals, stages and tools. It then focuses on the main scientific outcome of the Project: the ADA Assessment Model (AdAM), an interdisciplinary tool that analyses and assesses the functional and social profile of disabled persons and their relationship with the physical environment in which they live. The ADA project impact can be understood by considering that so far, in addition to 362 disabled persons and their families, it involved over 100 people – among physicians, social workers, architects, sociologists, rehabilitators, experts in assistive and home automation technologies and administrative personnel – and three entities: the Tuscany Regional Government, the University of Florence and the National Research Council (CNR) in Pisa. The digital versions of the English edition of the book describing the ADA project are also accessible to people with severe visual impairments. An ‘alternative text’ is also provided for any non-textual (images) or partially textual (diagrams and tables) object, which offers to the blind or visually impaired reader an equivalent text accessible through Text-to-Speech software (TTS). Alternative texts have been drawn up by the authors together with Dr. Barbara Leporini, a researcher of the Signals and Images Lab, ISTI-CNR, Pisa. Given the complexity of some tables, it was a particularly demanding challenge. This is one of the few experiences in Italy of a book with these features born from the collaboration between authors and a publishing house, and the first for the Firenze University Press. The digital versions (PDF, EPUB) can be downloaded from the following link: https://fupress.com/catalogo/designing-autonomy-at-home--the-ada-project/3823 The EPUB version, more performing, requires specific software.