Abstract

Assistive Technology (AT) has largely been designed around needs that, even when they change over time, are relatively predictable; yet trauma produces disruptions that are rapid, context-dependent, and culturally mediated. This paper asks: what conceptual tensions emerge when trauma recovery technology is viewed through an AT lens, and what do those tensions reveal about the limits and future direction of the field?

Drawing on global expert interviews with mental health professionals and Assistive Technology researchers and designers, we use trauma not to argue for or against a new classification, but as a deliberate provocation—a stress test that makes visible the faultlines in AT’s existing foundations. Five faultlines emerge: stigma and entitlement; relational healing; the risk of outsourcing internal capacity to devices; diagnosis-versus-function design logics; and cultural fit. Together, these faultlines suggest that AT’s inherited assumptions—often built around predictable impairments, discrete devices, and Western individual users—are ill-equipped for psychosocial, fluctuating, and culturally diverse forms of disability.

1.      Introduction

In this paper, we adopt the definition of trauma encompassing the long-term functional aftermath of serious adversities—childhood abuse and neglect, domestic violence, conflict, displacement, natural disaster, disability, and medical trauma. These experiences do not fade with time (SAMHSA, 2026). This framing draws on psychosocial traditions that understand trauma as emerging through ongoing interactions between intrapsychic experience, relationships, and sociopolitical context, rather than as a purely individual psychological condition (Agger, 2001; Chesner & Lykou, 2021). This is particularly important in collectivist settings such as Nepal, where trauma is rarely experienced or recovered from in isolation.

Although not everyone who experiences trauma sustains long-term impact on their mental health, such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), many individuals experience disruptions to daily functioning: difficulties with concentration, emotional regulation, decision-making, tolerating sensory environments, and safely engaging in relationships and public spaces (Herman, 1992; van der Kolk, 2014). Crucially, these disruptions are not uniform or predictable: they are triggered by specific contexts, can shift rapidly within a single environment, and are shaped by memory, culture, and social meaning in ways that make them difficult to anticipate or standardise around; these experiences do not fade with time.

Psychosocial approaches have long argued that trauma exposes how individual suffering is shaped by political histories, social inequalities, and relational structures (Chesner & Lykou, 2021). Viewed through this lens, trauma is not an edge case but a diagnostic site: a condition that makes visible the assumptions embedded in systems designed to support everyday functioning — including, we argue, Assistive Technology. This paper does not attempt to resolve whether trauma recovery technologies should be classified as AT. Instead, it treats that question as a deliberate provocation: what conceptual tensions emerge when trauma recovery technology is viewed through an AT framework, and what do those tensions reveal about the limits—and future direction—of the field?

To explore this, we draw on expertise of mental health professionals and AT researchers across the globe, treating points of agreement, resistance, and uncertainty as diagnostic data. What emerges are not clear answers but faultlines: conceptual tensions that expose how AT’s inherited assumptions—often built around predictable impairments, discrete devices, and Western individual users—fit uneasily with psychosocial, fluctuating, and culturally embedded forms of disability (Shakespeare, 2006; Grech, 2015).

This paper explores what happens when we view technology designed for trauma recovery not just as an app or gadget, but as an essential support tool. By interviewing experts in both trauma therapy and technology design, we discovered five key challenges that currently hold these tools back, such as how to balance digital support with the need for human connection, and why technology built for Western individuals often doesn’t work in collectivist cultures like Nepal. These findings highlight a gap between what we are currently building and what survivors actually need for long-term recovery. Ultimately, we provide a new framework and practical guidelines to help designers create more reliable, inclusive, and effective tools that genuinely help people in their everyday lives.