Type of Project: Funded project
Individual socio-technical arrangements with digital consumer technology for the societal participation of people with intellectual disabilities

The aim of the Digital Participation project is to promote the social participation of people with intellectual disabilities through digital media technologies. The project aims at new low-cost and suitable support offers from the field of consumer technology in order to sustainably develop their potential for promoting participation. Through the development of suitable strategies and practical organizational solutions, people with intellectual disabilities and their relatives should be enabled to acquire new technologies in the field of consumer technology (e.g. navigation, language assistance systems, tablets, smartphones, networked objects). Relatives are people who are relevant from the point of view of the participants (friends, neighbors, relatives, etc.).

The Digital Participation project sees itself as a direct contribution to the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN-BRK), according to which social barriers are to be broken down through appropriate measures in order to enable full and effective participation on the basis of equality. The use of new technologies offers great opportunities for breaking down social barriers with regard to a digitized society. The project is thus located at the interface between conventional offers of assistance for the disabled and the independent and self-determined participation of people with disabilities.

The project pursues a transdisciplinary research approach, with the project partners anchored in different disciplines (curative education, nursing science, technology) researching possibilities for digital inclusion. Together with people with intellectual disabilities, barriers to participation with regard to access to digital content and the increasingly digitized society are to be identified and removed. The project takes place in the research network between the Catholic University of Freiburg (project management Prof. Dr. Gregor Renner, Prof. Dr. Florian Kiuppis), the University of Karlsruhe (Prof. Dr. Matthias Wölfel) and the University of Furtwangen (Prof. Dr. Christophe Kunze) and is financed under the title "Individual socio-technical arrangements for the social participation of people with cognitive functional impairments (InstAgT)" by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) through the FH Sozial funding measure.