The ability to perform activities of daily living and mobility-related activities of daily living are substantial indicators of one's ability to live at home and to participate in one's community. Technologies to assist with mobility and manipulation are among the most important tools that clinicians can provide to people with disabilities to promote independence and community participation. For people with severe disabilities involving both the upper and lower extremities, there are few systems that provide practical and coordinated assistance with mobility and manipulation tasks. The personal mobility and manipulation appliance (PerMMA) was created in response to goals set forth by a team of clinicians and people with disabilities.

Web services are rapidly becoming the technology of choice for integrating distributed application components in heterogeneous computing environments. In this paper, we present a novel e-commerce prototype application that itself would not be feasible without the leverage provided by underlying Web services technologies for flexible design and rapid prototyping. The application is a model-driven service brokerage that allows service providers to model, advertise, validate, and create a wide range of services (e.g. Internet access services such as DSL, cable, video-on-demand, etc) in an open marketplace in an automated fashion. The application answers real needs expressed by today's large service providers and goes beyond the current state-of-the-art in online communication marketplaces. It consists of several functional components, i.e. a service dependency modeling tool, brokerage engine, location services, and workflow engine - that have been independently developed on diverse platforms, e.g., J2EE, .NET. To efficiently integrate these components, we have designed a distributed Web services architecture, in which one Web service functions as a "hub" between previously disconnected components, another works as a "wrapper" of legacy data systems, while another "orchestrates" invocations of these services. Use of Web services has enabled parallel and independent development and testing, greatly increasing productivity and reducing time to get the system operational. It has also fostered the development of new brokerage features, which would have been difficult to plan without first experimenting with a "live" system.