Chaos theory and artificial intelligence may provide insights on disability outcomes
Dido Green, Niklas Lavesson · Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology · 2019
Chaos theory and artificial intelligence may provide insights on disability outcomesModels arising from studies of human behaviour can help us reflect upon why individuals and societies operate the way they do.In particular, models of disability help us understand not only the determinants of various diseases and disorders and impact of events and interventions on these, but also provide frameworks for health and social care practice.Current perspectives of disability have been influenced by bio-psycho-social models, outlined in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (https://www.who.int/classifications/ icf/en/), that shift the concept of disability and consequent participation restrictions away from individual impairments to the influence of physical and societal (attitudinal) environments.However, these models struggle to account for the multiple dynamic interactions that exist between the physical and emotional experiences of individuals across many and changing environments.1 Thus, to understand the impact of disability in diverse settings, models must incorporate measures of the numerous and diverse transactions and intersections that occur among the person, activity, and environment, as they evolve.Chaos theory arises from the study of dynamical systems in which non-linear processes are highly sensitive to fluctuations and particularly to initial conditions.Many natural systems, such as weather and climate, represent chaotic systems, 2 but applications of chaos theory to studies of human behaviour have been limited 3 and even more restricted in the field of disability and special needs.4 Navarro and Arrieta 3 have shown how methodologies from chaos theory better describe the highly irregular (and individual) dynamics of work motivation.Chaos represents randomness and unpredictability, epitomizing the phenomenon