The Psychologist’s Role: A Neglected Presence in the Assistive Technology Assessment Process

The international scientific literature has never given a clear definition of the role and competencies of the (clinical) psychologist in the rehabilitation field. A search for ‘psychologist role’ and ‘disab*’ or ‘rehabil*’ in the ‘abstract’ field of the main scientific production’s databases elicits no more than 28 journal articles from 1973 to 2010. Very few of these refer to the placement of the clinical psychologist in a centre for technical aid. Nevertheless, the recent advance of the biopsychosocial model, the call for integration of objective and subjective measures, the recognized growing relevance of personal factors to the long-term success of assistive technology (AT) matching, and the increasing attention to the ‘imbalance of power’ [2] in the relationship between professionals and users all require a change of attitude and practice in terms of the role of the psychologist in the AT assessment (ATA) process. Therefore it is time for ‘psycho’ to act as more than simply a prefix. The World Health Organization should face the major challenge of operationalizing the personal factors of the ICF after ten years of deafening silence. There is a risk that the call for complexity, implied in the biopsychosocial model, will be ignored, reducing the ICF to merely a flat juxtaposition of medical and social models without either a real qualitative leap or a creative synthesis for comparison. According to the ideal model of an ATA process in the centre for technical aid proposed by Scherer and Federici and colleagues [15, 16], this study puts forward a proposal for the precise placement of the clinical psychologist in the process of matching people and technology and outlines the skills required for each stage of the intervention.