Accidents, injury, illness, and disability can make a person dependent on specialized medical equipment and machines. While these items improve quality of life significantly, they are often prohibitively expensive and difficult to obtain.
Ezer Mizion’s Equipment Loan Centers offer people an alternative to purchasing medical and rehabilitative equipment for short-term use, easing the financial burden on families of ill and disabled people. Located throughout Israel, the Loan Centers lend close to 80,000 pieces of specialized equipment every year.
Speech Generating Devices (SGD) Lending Center was established with funding from the National Insurance Institute’s Foundation for Development of Services for the Disabled.
This Lending Center is the only one of its kind in the Middle East for speech generating devices and one of the few existing in the entire world.
The Center operates under the direction of Yonit Hagoel-Karnieli, a speech therapist specializing in Alternate Augmentative Communication (AAC). Every year, thousands of devices are loaned to children with special needs and adults with a range of communication impairments.
Two types of speech generating devices are available for loan: units that generate digital speech that work with pre-recorded vocal messages, and sophisticated units such as iPads and talking computers that generated synthetic speech with unlimited message possibilities. The Lending Center also features a unique, highly professional accessibility unit and the “Omer” Center for evaluations.
Lending procedure:
Ezer Mizion would like to thank the major sponsors of its equipment loan centers for their support: