INTRODUCTION

Research has well-established that assistive technologies (AT) allow individuals with disabilities to increase their function, safety, and participation in daily life activities. However, a third of AT devices are abandoned resulting in considerable health care costs, increased burden on caregivers, and decreased independence, quality of life, and safety for device users [1].  Given the positive impact of stakeholder engagement in research, there is a call in rehabilitation research for greater involvement of stakeholders and communities in the research process [3].  Community engagement in AT research can help create a better match between what users want and need and the available AT.  It can do it by identifying more relevant questions, enlisting community resources, and  generating knowledge that is more easily transferable and usable by the users of AT [2]. However, there are many challenges in translating community engagement principles into community-based AT research in low-income Hispanic communities.  They include: 1) lack of AT researchers’ understanding and experience with engaging communities; 2) skepticism about research in theses communities; 3) power differences in which the research process is still mainly controlled by the researchers, and; 4) a limited group of stakeholders being involved in rehabilitation research  [4,5]. The AT field is lacking richly descriptive information about community engagement in research, with practical, real-world examples and application of principles of engagement principles.

This paper describes an approach to community engagement from an NIH-funded study of disparities in the adoption and use of AT by older Hispanics. We aimed to identify effective practices to enhance community engagement of low-income Hispanic communities in AT research. The results of this research may be used to significantly improve the effectiveness of AT researchers’ efforts to engage marginalized low-income communities in their studies.