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.

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.