TRON Electronic Prosthetics (TEP) is an expression that has been adopted by The Realtime Operating system Nucleus (TRON) Project to concisely describe hardware and/or software technology specially designed to be attached to, implanted in, or interfaced with the handicapped, thus enabling them to utilize TRON-based resources.
Traditionally, prosthetics is the branch of medicine concerned with the research and development of artificial organs and body parts, which are either attached to, or implanted in the disabled. Traditional prosthetics devices are both functional (e.g., artificial heart valves, hip joints, hands, and legs) and nonfunctional (e.g., artificial eyes).
However, the advent of modern technology, particularly computer technology, has brought forth the possibility of developing prosthetic devices for the handicapped that lie outside the realm of traditional prosthetics. Not only is it now possible to replace major organs such as the heart with prosthetics devices, but the knowhow also exists to fabricate extra-corporal, parallel limbs for quadriplegics, which could be controlled solely through voice recognition technology.
As a result, it was decided to use the term prosthetics in a much broader sense than it has been used up to now, both to avoid a lengthy expression that would have to be reduced into an unfamiliar acronym, and a totally new term that could lead to even more confusion. Moreover, it should be noted that the term “prosthetic” has already been taken over by the field of linguistics (e. g., a prosthetic vowel), so we see no reason why the meaning of prosthetics should not be expanded to serve the needs of the TRON Project.
However, since prosthetics is a rather specialized term that even many native English speakers are not familiar with, we have also coined the term “Enableware,” i.e., computer hardware and/or software specially designed to `enable’ disabled persons and persons with special needs to utilize modern computer equipment, in particular TRON-based equipment.