All Wales Personalised Technology Community of Practice

Personalised technology (PT) is any item, piece of equipment or product that is used by a disabled person to maintain or improve their independence and quality of life.

The term ‘Personalised technology’ has been used in description of ‘Person Centred Technology’ (PCT) or ‘Assistive Technology’ (AT), ‘Electronic Assistive Technology’ (EAT), and ‘Technology Enabled Care’ TEC). It also includes mainstream technology that is in everyday use by the general population, it may be acquired commercially, modified, customised or prescribed by health and/or social care.

In August 2017 we started facilitating meetings of interested organisations to explore what work we can do together to promote the use of personalised technology to people with a learning disability. In this time we have:

• Identified the barriers to people being able to have and use personalised technology.

• written an Ethical Framework.

• written a Plain English paper describing personalised technology into four areas: To live a healthy and safe life; Keep in touch with others; Around your home and to communicate better.

• gathered and shared good practice stories and started ‘mapping’ what people are using.

• promoted personalised technology at our 2018 annual conference and held an event in July this year ‘Support for living in the 21st Century’ that explored how 3 organisations addressed integrating technology into the day to day lives and support for the people they work with.