Welcome to the 1st TIDE Congress on Rehabilitation Technology Strategies for European Union. The Congress is being held in Brussels on 6 & 7 April 1993. It offers a unique opportunity to gather people from inside and outside Europe to share the results of the projects and discuss critical issues and possibilities for the future of Rehabilitation Technology in Europe, a future with an enormous market of between 60 and 80 million people concerned.

The Congress will last two days and consists of 3 parallel streams of sessions as well as an exhibition running in parallel. The subjects addressed are :

The Results from R&D Programmes.

Under these topics contributions were selected to cover the benefits for Rehabilitation Technology coming from basic and applied industrial research carried on in Community or national R&D programmes. Also considered was the impact on RT of the results of Information Technology R&D projects in areas like Microelectronics, Communications, Bioengineering, Computer Hard- and Software and suggestions for targets and development profile in RT to be explored by TIDE.

The Methodology of R&D Programmes.

Within this topic, contributions have been selected to approach the analysis of the aspects that influence the orientation of R&D and to identify specific requirements arising from the interaction between elderly or disabled persons and the various scenarios of life. Challenging areas were also considered from the point of view of their technical complexity or the innovations in general technical production processes as well as the implication of the involvement of multidisciplinary fields, human factor techniques, or complex evaluation and verification methodologies in the RT.

Market and Service Delivery.

For this topic contributions have been selected on subjects dealing with market issues such as technology transfer, information dissemination, legislation, consumer involvement, if possible based on empirical data, cases or field studies.

In the exhibition, the 20 TIDE Pilot Action projects will demonstrate their results and achievements, displaying the prototypes developed during the projects lifetime. The exhibition, which is open to the general public, also shows innovative contributions from other companies and organizations active in the RT field.

The exhibition offers an excellent opportunity to acquire comprehensive knowledge about the results obtained in all areas of the TIDE Initiative programme and it shows the contribution it makes to the economic and social life of disabled and elderly people in the Community.

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the Congress: the Programme Committee in charge of selecting papers; the authors and reviewers of the papers themselves; the chairmen, speakers, the project teams which set up the Exhibition demonstrations, the TIDE Office team and the TIDE Secretariat MC-Consultancy.

E. Ballabio

TIDE OFFICE