The advent of soft robotics represents a profound change in the forms robots will take in the future. However, this revolutionary change has already yielded such a diverse collection of robots that attempts at defining this group do not reflect existing "soft" robots. This paper aims to address this issue by scrutinizing a number of descriptions of soft robots arising from a literature review with the intention of determining a coherent meaning for soft. We also present a classification of existing soft robots to initiate the development of a soft robotic ontology. Finally, discrepancies in prescribed ranges of Young's modulus, a frequently used criterion for the selection of soft materials, are explained and discussed. A detailed visual comparison of these ranges and supporting data is also presented.

Summary Background: The timely provision of complete and up-to-date patient data to clinicians has for decades been one of the most pressing objectives to be fulfilled by information technology in the healthcare domain. The so-called electronic health record (EHR), which provides a unified view of all relevant clinical data, has received much attention in this context from both research and industry. This situation has given rise to a large number of research projects and commercial products that aim to address this challenge. Different projects and initiatives have attempted to address this challenge from various points of view, which are not easily comparable. Objectives: This paper aims to clarify the challenges, concepts, and approaches involved, which is essential in order to consistently compare existing solutions and objectively assess progress in the field. Methods: This is achieved by two different means. Firstly, the paper will identify the most significant issues that differentiate the points of view and intended scope of existing approaches. As a result, a framework for analysis of EHR systems will be produced. Secondly, the most representative EHR-related projects and initiatives will be described and compared within the context of this framework. Results: The main result of the present paper is an analysis framework for EHR systems. This is intended as an initial step towards an attempt to structure research on this field, clearly lacking sound principles to evaluate and compare results, and ultimately focusing its efforts and being able to objectively evaluate scientific progress. Conclusions: Evaluation and comparison of results in medical informatics, and specifically EHR systems, must address technical and nontechnical aspects. It is challenging to condensate in a single framework all potential views of such a field, and any chosen approach is bound to have its limitations. That being said, any well structured comparison approach, such as the framework presented here, is better than no comparison framework at all, as has been the current situation to date. This paper has presented the first attempt known to the authors to define such a framework.

We are currently living in a decade where smart objects and Internet of Things (IoT)-based devices are becoming part of daily life in different contexts. This research seeks to investigate and verify, by using a formal literature review methodology, the most visible aspects of technological development, within the Industry 4.0 and IoT scenario, in relation to the theories of the so called “Planned Obsolescence”. This study covers a defined number of works on Design theories and practices on how to face the issue of built-in obsolescence of devices in the era of the Connected Devices. The majority of the works studied are useful to create substrates of essential knowledge that strengthen the concept of premature ageing of technological devices and it has been noticed that the discipline of Design can be used as an incentive to extend life, improve the usability of existing products and empower user abilities.

The population of older adults will continuously increase over the coming decades. As they get older, people will require assistance and regular monitoring, with higher costs for welfare system and families. Two vital aspects of a healthy lifestyle, are domestic autonomy and maintenance of relationships within the neighborhood. This leads to an interesting research issue: “Could houses and appliances have the potential to improve autonomy and quality of life of citizens? Which methods and tools could enhance wellbeing and healthy conditions? The house has the potential to be a safe, adaptive environment, integrated with technologies for life support. This work seeks to investigate the key implications of architectural accessibility, interior Design features and interactive technologies, related to User Experience Design. The proposed Design approach called “Environment Design to Sustain Users” is based on a scenario composed of two empirical strategies. The reported research aims to support the creation of a new standard of houses in which people can live in a healthy way, enjoying the opportunities of ICT, which shall be “enabling” and integrated in an unobtrusive way so as to be accepted by the user.

Clinical archetypes provide a means for health professionals to design what should be communicated as part of an Electronic Health Record (EHR). An ever-growing number of archetype definitions follow this health information modelling approach, and this international archetype resource will eventually cover a large number of clinical concepts. On the other hand, clinical terminology systems that can be referenced by archetypes also have a wide coverage over many types of health-care information. No existing work measures the clinical content coverage of archetypes using terminology systems as a metric. Archetype authors require guidance to identify under-covered clinical areas that may need to be the focus of further modelling effort according to this paradigm. This paper develops a first map of SNOMED-CT concepts covered by archetypes in a repository by creating a so-called terminological Shadow. This is achieved by mapping appropriate SNOMED-CT concepts from all nodes that contain archetype terms, finding the top two category levels of the mapped concepts in the SNOMED-CT hierarchy, and calculating the coverage of each category. A quantitative study of the results compares the coverage of different categories to identify relatively under-covered as well as well-covered areas. The results show that the coverage of the well-known National Health Service (NHS) Connecting for Health (CfH) archetype repository on all categories of SNOMED-CT is not equally balanced. Categories worth investigating emerged at different points on the coverage spectrum, including well-covered categories such as Attributes, Qualifier value, under-covered categories such as Microorganism, Kingdom animalia, and categories that are not covered at all such as Cardiovascular drug (product).