Fabio Meloni

The purpose of this study was to validate a self-administered 36-item Persian (Farsi) version of the World Health Organization (WHO) Disability Assessment Schedule II (now referred to as WHODAS 2.0) for assessment of psychiatric patients' perceptions of their functioning and disability. WHODAS 2.0 items were analyzed using two approaches. Reliabili...

An assistive technology assessment process model that is consistent with the ICF, in that it emphasizes the individual’s well-being and the best match between the user and the AT solution, is needed, and is thus proposed in this chapter. This requires a user-driven process through which the selection of one or more technological aids for an AT solu...

We faced a twofold open question regarding the measurement of individual functioning, i.e., what individual functioning measures and how it should be measured. These issues arise from the nature of the concept of disability; in other words, it is a complex construct and a “multidimensional experience [that] poses several challenges for measurement....

An exoskeleton is an active mechanical device that is anthropomorphic in nature, is “worn” by an operator, fits closely to his or her body, and works in concert with the wearer’s movements. Generally, the term “exoskeleton” is used to describe a device augmenting the performance of an able-bodied wearer. In contrast, the term “active orthosis” is d...

The present chapter deals with the role and the competencies of the psychologist in a center for technical aid. The lapse of the psychologist’s role in assistive technology (AT) assessment is probably due to the non-coding of personal factors in the ICF. In viewing the psychologist as the “specialist” on personal factors, the authors call for a rev...

Since 2012, usability testing in Italian public administration (PA) has been guided by the eGLU 2.1 technical protocols, which provide a set of principles and procedures to support specialized usability assessments in a controlled and predictable way. This paper describes a new support tool for usability testing that aims to facilitate the applicat...

Purpose: This systematic review examines research and practical applications of the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule (WHODAS 2.0) as a basis for establishing specific criteria for evaluating relevant international scientific literature. The aims were to establish the extent of international dissemination and use of WHODAS 2....

Play is a natural mode of children’s expression and constitutes a fundamental aspect of their life. Cognitive, affective, and social aspects can be assessed through play, considered as a “window” to observe a child’s functioning. According to Russ’s model, cognitive and affective components and their reciprocal connections can be assessed through t...

Supplementary Table S1 summarizes the information extracted from the 810 selected studies ON WHODAS 2.0; Supplementary Table S2 displays frequencies (number and percentage) for the six main study characteristics of the included studies: year of publication; study design; country where the study was conducted; research field; WHODAS 2.0 version used...

Il presente lavoro è stato effettuato presso il Centro di diagnosi e terapia dell’obesità e della grave obesità dell’Azienda Ospedaliera San Camillo Forlanini di Roma, allo scopo di osservare e descrivere la relazione tra i livelli di funzionamento e disabilità autopercepiti e il Binge Eating Disorder (BED) in un campione di persone gravemente obes...

http://atlasofscience.org/how-much-does-abandonment-of-assistive-technology-cost-italys-national-health-service/

Background: This study was an extension of research which began in the Umbria region in 2009. Aim: To investigate the extent to which assistive technology (AT) has been abandoned by users of the Italian National Health Service (ULHS) and the reasons for this. Design: Observational study. Setting: Users who received a hearing device (HD) or m...

The exoskeleton is a robotics-assisted, powered device that enables paralyzed patients to stand up and walk. This chapter examines the state of art concerning the use of active, powered, and wearable lower limb exoskeletons for aiding and rehabilitating paraplegic patients’ gait disorders resulting from serious central nervous system lesions. A qua...

Objective: This review examines the utility of current active, powered, wearable lower limb exoskeletons as aids to rehabilitation in paraplegic patients with gait disorders resulting from central nervous system lesions. Methods: The PRISMA guidelines were used to review literature on the use of powered and active lower limb exoskeletons for neu...

In a telephone interview users were asked to respond to a three-section questionnaire consisting of both open and closed questions. The questionnaire included the Italian versions of the Assistive Technology Use Follow-up Survey (ATUFS) 1.1, adapted to collect data on use and non-use of AT, and the Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with Assist...

The present research tested whether children's disability representations are influenced by cultural variables (e.g., social activities, parent education, custom complex variables) or by cognitive constraints. Four questionnaires were administered to a sample of 76 primary school aged children and one of their parents (n = 152). Questionnaires incl...

Background. The assistive technology assessment (ATA) process developed by Federici and Scherer [1] provides professionals with guidelines for an effective outcome in the AT selection and assignment process with the aim to match person and assistive technology (AT). Purpose. A case study open out as the ATA process is put into practice, leading the...

Background. The introduction of assistive technology (AT) into people’s lives is a deliberative and long-term process, which presupposes teamwork as much as professionalism, time, and experience. The aim of the assistive technology assessment (ATA) process is to suggest guidelines to follow in order to reach valid results during the AT selection an...

The abandonment of assistive technology (AT) is strictly related to the subjective quality of the service delivery regarding the whole AT assignation process. Starting from this consideration, the aim of this work is to show the design of a Web-based follow-up model (WFM) aimed at overcoming the hearing aid abandonment in the Italian Umbria Region...

Health is a complex and multifactorial construct that coincides with a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and does not merely consist of the absence of disease, impairment, or infirmity. For this reason, pharmacological treatments alone cannot achieve well-being in the person to whom they are being administered. A growing body...

As Meloni and colleagues (2011; 2012) claim, the non-coding of personal factors in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health could be considered as one of the most influential causes of the scarcity of scientific literature on the role of the psychologist in the field of rehabilitation in general and in the assistive te...

Questo capitolo illustra il modello biopsicosociale così come è stato reso operativo dalla Classificazione internazionale del funzionamento, della disabilità e della salute dell’OMS, dalla Convenzione sui diritti delle persone con disabilità, dalla 2002 AAMR Definition, Classification, and System of Supports, e più recentemente dal World Report on...

Questo capitolo è suddiviso in tre sezioni principali. La prima si concentra su quali misure del funzionamento individuale debbano essere utilizzate con un’attenzione al principio secondo il quale la disabilità è un costrutto multidimensionale e non esiste un principio basilare di misurazione valido per qualunque valutazione. Inoltre, l’unico princ...

Arth therapy, beauty, simulazione incarnata, embodied simulation Today the artistic mediation of art therapy continues to support the adaptive success that art has promoted into the human being development. From the biological roots of arts to the empathy in the aesthetic experience, a process of aesthetic care of the art therapy is drawn. This pro...

L’allungamento della vita media negli ultimi sessant’anni ha prodotto nei paesi occidentali il grande fenomeno dell’invecchiamento della popolazione, che ora avanza anche nei paesi emergenti sullo scenario mondiale. Oggi in Italia siamo al primo esprimersi di una generazione che vive così a lungo: poco meno di due milioni di ultraottantacinquenni,...

The process of matching assistive technology to person requires a well-designed and researched sequential set of assessments that are administered by professionals with different areas of expertise in specialized centers for technical aids. The team of experts acts as a mediator between the person with a disability and the assistive technology. The...

The international scientific literature is unanimous in finding that the theme of sexuality in disability is still latent and overwhelming both in residential centers of care and assistance and in the families of the disabled themselves. The sexuality of a disabled person is not amongst the explicit purposes of his or her education or rehabilitatio...

Implicit social cognition is an empirical phenomenon encompassing the effects of experience on judgements and decisions. We evaluate whether the wide range of attitudes towards people with disabilities are attributable to universal and species-specific cognitive constraints. We propose that there is a link between an evolved mechanism of avoidance...

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF) consists of 34 codes per person at the one digit level and, at more detailed levels, the number of codes can reach 1424 items. This degree of complexity has led research groups to develop core sets of ICF codes for specific health conditions and disabilities. The ICF core...

The origins of the biopsychosocial model date back to the proposal put forward by psy-chiatrist George Engel in 1977 to integrate within the medical model the dominant social and psychological variables: The dominant model of disease today is biomedical, and it leaves no room within its framework for the social, psychological, and behavioural dimen...

Abstract: As Meloni, Federici, and Stella (2011) claim, the non-coding of personal factors in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health could be considered as one of the most influential causes of the scarcity of scientific literature on the role of the psychologist in the field of rehabilitation in general and in the a...

Introduction and Aim. Although many Western countries show a growing interest in the inclusion of the issue of sexuality in the training on disability for professional caregivers, many of the practitioners neglect the issue or devalue themselves as incompetent or revealing the prevalence of strong prejudice. Between 2009 and 2010 authors were grant...

Scopo di questo intervento è quello di contribuire al dibattito sul costrutto di identità sessuale, evidenziando l’esistenza di più di un modello dell’identità sessuale e, dunque, di differenti spiegazioni non solo e non tanto sulla formazione dell’identità sessuale stessa ma, più in generale, sulle dinamiche e sullo sviluppo della più ampia dimens...

Introduction and aim: Studies on the models of disability have been conducted almost exclusively within a sociological perspective. The authors have carried out studies aimed at verifying whether the disability models are attributable not only to contextual variables but also to universal and species-specific human cognitive constraints. The purpos...

Aim. Based on the ten-year (2001-2010) report data by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research, the authors provide an analysis of the inclusion and integration processes of disabled students in the state and non-state Italian compulsory schools. The data, not yet officially published by the Ministry, were granted to the authors a...

Come già fecero notare Federici e colleghi nel 2003 a commento dei dati del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione (MPI) relativi al decennio 1989/1999, il problema della qualità dell’inserimento scolastico degli alunni disabili si ripresenta oggi con la pubblicazione dei nuovi dati del MPI sull’ultimo decennio della scuola italiana. Possiamo affermar...

The complexity and multidimensionality of the concept of disability leads to the debate on the existence of an “elixir of measurement” for a so-called “definitional paradox” (Madans & Altman, 2006). According to the operational nature of the disability concept, any theoretical definition implies an insoluble contradiction (aporia), while any operat...

8.1 The Languishing Psychologist's Role inAssistive Technology Assessment Psychology itself is dead. Or, to put it another way, psychology is in a funny situation. My college, Dartmouth, is constructing a magnificent new building for psychology. Yet its four stories go like this: The basement is all neuroscience. The first floor is devoted to class...

This chapter focuses on the different contexts in which the assessment of individual functioning and disability for the assignment of assistive technologies is carried out. The theoretical framework constituted by the biopsychosocial model of disability is briefly described followed by a brief summary of the worldwide main classifications, internat...

The international scientific literature has never given a clear definition of the role and competencies of the (clinical) psychologist in the rehabilitation field. A search for ‘psychologist role’ and ‘disab*’ or ‘rehabil*’ in the ‘abstract’ field of the main scientific production’s databases elicits no more than 28 journal articles from 1973 to 20...

In this work, we present the sonification procedure of a visual Web search engine called WhatsOnWeb (WoW) and its usability evaluation. The WoW search engine is based on graphic visualisation algorithms conveying datasets by semantic correlations and clusters through graph-drawing methods. WoW has been developed combining different visual and audit...

We conducted a literature review of 58 studies on homophobia and LGBT disabled people published between 1994 and 2013 that reported a complex and conflictual relationship among different cultures. These are the expression of three social communities: (i) the LGBT community, (ii) the disabled community, and (iii) the mainstream society (mainly ident...

Il presente lavoro ha l’intento di illustrare la produzione scientifica nazionale ed internazionale sul tema dei diritti delle persone disabili, sulle fonti di legittimazione degli stessi e, in particolare, sui diritti connessi ai temi dell’affettività e della sessualità. La ricerca bibliografica, condotta sulle banche dati elettroniche ERIC (Educa...

This work aims to illustrate an overview of homophobia and disability in scientific literature. All of these studies seem to follow a prevailing theoretical perspective based on the social model of disability, which is often associated with the Queer and Feminist theories. We found that both LGBTQI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and in...

Il presente lavoro ha l’intento di illustrare la produzione scientifica nazionale ed internazionale sul fenomeno dell’omofobia in relazione alle persone disabili. La ricerca bibliografica, condotta sui principali database di riferimento (Medline, PsycINFO e PsycARTICLES) ha individuato 30 studi [1-4, 7, 10-17, 19-25], pertinenti con le keywords com...

The World Health Organisation Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II) is an instrument developed by the World Health Organisation (WHO) in order to assess behavioural limitations and restrictions to participation experienced by an individual, independently from a medical diagnosis (WHO 2004). The conceptual frame of reference of this instrume...

Dopo una recente validazione italiana dell’WHODAS II (Federici et al., 2009a; 2009b) si intende valutare il comportamento dello strumento su un campione di 300 soggetti (100 anziani con deterioramento cognitivo, 100 anziani sani e 100 caregiver) in relazione a tre obiettivi: (i) misurare l’affidabilità dell’WHODAS II all’aumentare della gravità del...

This review is a critical analysis regarding the study and utilization of the World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II) as a basis for establishing specific criteria for evaluating relevant international scientific literature.The WHODAS II is an instrument developed by the World Health Organisation in order to assess b...

The World Health Organisation Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II) is an instrument developed by the World Health Organisation in order to assess behavioural limitations and restrictions to participation experienced by an individual, independently from a medical diagnosis. The conceptual frame of reference of this instrument is the Interna...

Representations of disability, shaping the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of parents, teachers and special needs educators were investigated. Two experiments were carried out: in the first one the disability representations of 90 participants were investigated through both qualitative analyses – consisting of textual interpretation of the data...

Our study analyse the validity and the reliability of two well-known questionnaires for the usability assessment, the SUMI and the QUIS, in their Italian version. The sample is composed of 250 university students of psychology (University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Faculty of Psychology 1), that used two questionnaires to assess the usability of the fa...

Introduzione. Questo studio presenta una rassegna critica sullo studio e l’utilizzo del WHODAS II, (World Health Organization Disability Assessment Schedule II) in base a quanto ad oggi compare nella letteratura scientifica internazionale. L’WHODAS II è uno strumento per l’autovalutazione delle limitazioni nell’attività e delle restrizioni nella pa...

Representations of disability shaping the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of 90 participants (teachers, parents, and special needs educators) are investigated in order to better evaluate the spread of the biopsychosocial model proposed by the ICF. The quasi-experimental purpose was investigated through both qualitative analyses and by quantitati...

Representations of disability, shaping the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of parents, teachers and special needs educators were investigated. Two experiments were carried out: in the first one the disability representations of 90 participants were investigated through both qualitative analyses – consisting of textual interpretation of the data...

Representations of disability, shaping the opinions, attitudes, and behaviour of parents, teachers and special needs educators were investigated. Two experiments were carried out: in the first one the disability representations of 90 participants were investigated through both qualitative analyses – consisting of textual interpretation of the data...

Introduzione. L’esistenza di molteplici, diverse e spesso inconciliabili definizioni del concetto di disabilità dimostra che la definizione di questa è un compito non facile ed ogni tentativo a tale proposito resta aperto a costanti revisioni (Gilson e BePoy, 2000; OMS, 2002). Non solo le diverse concezioni teoriche dello sviluppo ma anche i divers...

Introduction. Identifying proper disability models that inform social and educational relationships of pupils with disabilities is an important step forward in the analysis of those “communicative stimuli” that affect the development of young people with disabilities (Federici, 2003), even beyond parental relationships. Moreover, a survey aimed to...

Nel presente lavoro è stata indagata l’operatività di due tra gli strumenti più diffusi per la misurazione dell’usabilità di interfacce, il SUMI e il QUIS. L’esame qui condotto sulla loro struttura fattoriale, attendibilità e validità convergente ha messo in evidenza i limiti psicometrici di questi strumenti, offrendo, altresì, indicazioni per la c...

Based on the World Health Organization’s current thinking about functioning and disability, and on the biopsychosocial model of disability promoted by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health, the WHO’s Disability Assessment Schedule II (WHODAS II) has been developed to assess the activity limitations and participatio...