My Dad has ALS

[Al]

Hi anne. Not sure which province you're in but in Ont. the Assistive Devices Program as well as the Society can help with assistive devices. You have to have an assessment and recomendation from an Occupational Therapist. if you go to www.dynavoxsys.com they have some that you can look at. I'm sure there are others but most of the people I've seen around use these.

 

[emjoi]

Anne, I'm afraid I dont know about the services int he USA.
The local Melbourne, Australia MND Society has things like Wheelchairs and text-to-speech devices for loan.

The Lightwriter is essentially a little keyboard with a one line LCD text screen, and a speech synthesizer. My Dad is a good typer and his hands are still up to the job, so it's a good solution.

Sometimes he uses a simple Whiteboard and marker and just writes. That works well too.

For a short while he tried one of those throat vocorder things, but it frightened his grandkids so he abandoned that.

Right now one of his fears is that his hands will get too weak to type.

 

[Al]

Hi Anne. The ALS Society can help with the aquisition of a speech device and the Adaptive Devices Program I believe will help fund them. I'm not 100% sure if the Society has any for loan so wouldn't want to say. I think you said you're in Toronto so call the Society and ask for Ravi Jain. He's the guy to ask about all that stuff. You can tell him Al Pettit told you to call him.

 

[anne]

Thank you all once again for the information. I will check into it further. Anne