The Wheelchair: Enabled or Disabled? Houston, We’ve Had a Problem

Abstract

In the previous chapter much of the higher rhetoric around technology and studies of technological benefits and barriers revolved around desk top technologies and technologies of communicative reach. These technologies are often market-mediated or at times facilitated by social work interventions, for example telecare. However, many technologies that sit at the heart of disabled people’s independence are mediated by healthcare professionals and rely on bodily assessments in meeting eligibility criteria. This is nowhere more evident than in research and practices around what was originally dubbed the wheeled chair—the focus of this chapter. The wheelchair is both a master symbol of independence to some disabled people, but also the archetypal health technology to many clinicians. Some interventions also require the informed consent of disabled people and degrees of risk-taking in connecting with technologies. These risks are both physical in the case of limb lengthening surgery (Kitoh et al. 2014) or involve social risk in the sense of uncertain social response, for example as is the case with neuroprosthesis or exoskeleton developments (Breen 2015; Musicus and Davis 2013; Schearer et al. 2012). Technologies are rarely freely chosen and may be subject to wider systems of monitoring or surveillance. Indeed telehealth interventions, their design and function, are based on monitoring principles. Whether one views this as helpful in providing early alerts that can avert health crises or see these as further evidence of a nanny state or services externalising risk depends upon your standpoint, but these technologies seem to be here to stay (Goode 2014; Henderson et al. 2013; Kobau et al. 2012).