Scoping Review Protocol of Technological Interventions for Vocational Inclusion of Individuals with Disabilities

Abstract

Technology could improve the vocational inclusion of people with disabilities, thus increasing their wellbeing and competence development. Moreover, societies could benefit from their skills and expertise. In this protocol, the objectives, structure, and further details of a scoping review on the subject of the vocational inclusion of people with disabilities via technologies are described. This article additionally demonstrates how a piloting phase can be used for the further development of the protocol. The focus of the proposed scoping review is disability, technology, and task/work. Expansive and specific keywords will be searched in APA PsycInfo, APA PsycArticles, and CINAHL Complete via EBSCOhost, Web of Science, Embase, Scopus, and IEEE Xplore. As regards the grey literature, ProQuest will be used for dissertations and theses and Google Scholar will be hand searched. Articles published in 2012–2022 focused on working-age adults will be exported to EndNote and titles/abstracts will be monitored. We further describe the inclusion and exclusion criteria, data extraction, and charting strategies of the proposed scoping review. The results will be mapped and reported based on disability, technology, and task. For the improvement of the protocol, a pilot study in February 2022 was performed. The results from the pilot, briefly reported herein, led to a transparent and clear structure of the proposed scoping review.

An Inclusive Workplace Approach to Disability through Assistive Technologies: A Systematic Review and Thematic Analysis of the Literature

“…In most of the articles, technology (see Table 1) was conceived as a useful tool for performing a task [41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58] and/or for the reduction of a physical [41,42,45,47,53,55,59,60], cognitive [43,44,48,49,54,56,[61][62][63][64][65], or mental health [66] accommodation/participation [48,[50][51][52]54,56,57,60,64,65,[67][68]…”

“…Overall, we encountered a considerable heterogeneity in studies concerning the use of AT and the concept of disability. A total of 14 articles dealt with disability in its most general sense [46,50,51,58,[68][69][70]73,74,[76][77][78]80,81] and among these only 2 articles, by Kumari and Lenka [50] and Smith and colleagues [74], comprehensively analyzed the different levels and forms of disability in the more general idea, proposed by the authors themselves, that various disabilities may require different approaches.…”

“…Out of 41, only 5 articles [57,62,65,67,80] included, in addition to the work and productive activities, the activities of daily living, and only 2 articles [61,65] also included play and leisure. Regarding the human component, twenty-six articles focused on the cognitive abilities of the target population [42,43,[48][49][50][51][52]54,56,57,59,[61][62][63][64][65][66][70][71][72][73][74]76,77,81], eleven on physical abilities [41,42,45,47,50,53,55,60,67,75,79], fourteen on disability in a broader sense [46,50,51,58,[68]…”

“…The context component mainly referred to the physical dimension [41][42][43][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55]57,[59][60][61][62]64,[66][67][68][69][70][71][72]74,[77][78][79][80] (in terms of accommodation) and, secondly, to the social dimension [42][43][44]47,48,50,[52][53][54]56,57,[59][60][61][62][63][64][65]67,…”