Rehabilitation Engineering

An engineering discipline focused on quantifying, measuring, and modeling human performance to provide better-fitting assistive technology adaptations. Rehabilitation engineering emerged partly as a response to trial-and-error approaches in assistive technology, bringing systematic performance measurement to the field. It develops engineering models of human capabilities and often measures performance on task batteries including non-computer tasks. While rehabilitation engineering and ability-based design both emphasize understanding user performance, rehabilitation engineering traditionally focuses on custom add-on devices and hardware accommodations rather than adapting mainstream software systems.