Universiti Malaya Community Engagement Centre (UMCares)

Universiti Malaya Community Engagement Centre (UMCares)

Be Able: Venturing Beyond Disabilities

Introduction

Be Able: Empowering the Disabilities is a platform, where us as educator educate the disabilities on how to use the assistive devices properly, empowering them to a new level of personality in talking and communicating, and explore them to a possibilities of sports activities so that they can have a sustain self-rehabilitation. The main objective of the program is to educate the People with Disabilities (PWD) on how to correctly use their assistive devices that include wheelchair, prosthetics and orthotics while conducting their daily life activities in metropolitan urban city such as Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Impact Minute

Our Team

Ir. Dr. Nasrul Anuar Abd Razak
Associate Professor Dr. Thilagavathi Shanmuganathan
Associate Professor Dr Rafidah Aga Mohd Jaladin
Dr. Maziah Mat Rosly

The methodology

The PWD community will use this program as platform to share their opinion and experience on how and what is actually, they need from their side to be share with the researcher, institutional and designer. They also use the program to motivate themselves in talking, improve themselves in sport activities which could also empower them to become a better person such as joining the para sport activities. The rational come when most of the PWD do not really understand on how to use their assistive devices given. They also shy and felt unconfident in talking and communicating with others and they felt useless without knowledgeable of a lot of activities that they can have. The program focuses on the PWD community from PLPP (Pusat Latihan Perindustrian & Pemulihan – Centre for Training the Industrial & Rehabilitation) who have an average of 50 PWD students per year, 10 lecturers from PLPP, 20 undergraduate University Degree and 5 University staff. This program was carried out using the University's (University of Malaya) facilities to serve the PWD community. It includes 3 important aspects:

Teaching and rehabilitation services,
Social and rehabilitation services,
Sports and recovery

Our collaborators, partners and sponsors

PLPP (Pusat Latihan Perindustrian & Pemulihan) / Centre for Training the Industrial & Rehabilitation)

Impact on the community and our UM students

Impact to the community

PWD from PLPP was educate and alert about the proper way in walking and the use of technology.
Alumni from PWD was empowered with the new prosthetic and orthothic devices, and assistive technology.
Teacher from PLPP was able to learn and conduct a new information regarding the technologies applied in prosthetic and orthotics

Impact to the UM's students

Staff from UM able to apply their knowledge directly to the community in both way directly
Student from UM able to get the real cases directly and understanding more throughout the observation from the student.

Moving forward

The data collection about the proper way of walking, validation of corrective measurement for the assistive devices for year one will be resume with the follow-up study for year two to figure out the improvement of the prosthetics and orthotics user.

The prosthetics and orthotics devices that has been provided to the PWD community will as well continue and the follow-up study of improvement will be measure for year two to figure out either the user can sustain using the information and technology from the Be Able team or not.

BE ABLE: VENTURING BEYOND DISABILITIES