According to the United Nations' definition of a three-stage aging society, China has entered into the aging society since 2000. As for the reason resulting in dysfunction of aged people, this paper points out that the majority is due to degenerative changes of the organs to cause the ability a gradual decline, besides the reason resulted from old-age disease. They are neither patients caused by diseases, nor people with disablities reaching the threshold on the continuum of disability;they might be called as aged people with disability. The re-habilitation of the aged people mainly relies on assistive technologies to improve the ability of activity and participation. The needs of assis-tive technology for old people as well as the role and selection principles of assistive technologies in rehabilitation of aged people are intro-duced in the paper. Finally, an overview of assistive technology for aged people is introduced in the paper.

Persons with disability had been existed in the world since human being existed thousands years ago. They have to make some simple devices to compensate lost functions in order to exist in the world. Those are called as ancient assistive products. The history of assistive products is summarized in the paper based on collected some literatures and divided into three stages, i.e., ancient, middle and modern.

The essential of assistive products is described in the paper including the definition, user, function, classification, feature and the principle of selecting assistive products in order to reference.

This paper briefly reviewed the developing process of assistive devices, which is from individual manufacture to batch production and finally to large -scale industry, introduced new concepts in the world concerning assistive devices, accessibility and assistive technology services. Thereby two suggestions about assistive devices in China are put forward in the paper. One is to do assistive technology services in Community-Based Rehabilitation(CBR) well so that to put popular type of assistive devices into the community and home. The other is to train a number of professionals to do assistive technology services and establish service-system of assistive devices to cover the entire country.

World Health Organization Wheelchair Service Package-Intermediate Level focuses on the people who have severe difficul-ties in walking and moving around and also having poor postural control, as well as the children who have poor postural control and are un-able to sit upright independently. It includes step 1 referral and appointment;step 2 assessment;step 3 prescription (selection);step 4 fund-ing and ordering;step 5 product (wheelchair) preparation;step 6 fitting;step 7 user training;and step 8 maintenance, repairs and follow up. The physical assessment and postural support device of wheelchair service-intermediate level were emphasized. It is characterized as the standardized process, individual assessment and modular postural support device. It implies that it is important to make the assistive technol-ogy service system standardized, professional and modular.

Objective To analyze the relationship between needs of assistive devices and the three other factors (age, disability categories, severity levels of disability) in order to scientifically formulate subsidy policy on assistive devices.MethodsThe assessment of rehabilitation needs for 928 Shenzhen citizens with new disability certificates in its six districts was performed by professionals, and the data was recorded into ACCESS database and analyzed.ResultsThe sequence of demand rates on assistive devices among disability categories was vision disability (78%), hearing disability (76%) and physical disability (74%); but speech, mental retardation and psychological disabilities had a low demand. The demand rates of assistive devices were dissimilar among four age groups for persons with vision, hearing and physical disabilities; for severity levels of three disability categories of vision, hearing and physical disabilities: the milder the vision disability was, the greater demand rates of assistive devices were; the demand rate of those with the second level of hearing disability was the highest; the demand rates of persons with the first and second levels of physical disability were relatively higher.ConclusionWhen drawing up subsidy policy on assistive devices for persons with disability, the disability categories, ages of persons with disability and severity levels of disability should be considered; the different types of assistive devices should be supplied according to rehabilitation goals at different age group; and necessary assistive devices should be provided according to severity levels of disability.

Based on the concept of environmental factors of ICF, together with the practice of environmental assessment and reform in the recent years, this paper discussed the principle, specification, procedures and content of environmental assessment.