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This pilot field study aimed to detect long-term changes in technology acceptance (TAM), user experience (UX) during use of an experimental demonstrator Bi-Manu-Interact (BMI) in stroke rehabilitation.

New technologies can be implemented in clinical rehabilitation processes or to close the gap in health care provision by transferring them to the patients’ home. Successful use can only be achieved under the assumption that the technology is accepted by its users. The involvement of users in iterative development processes is to be shown to increase the quality of health care systems and to prevent refusal. In this review potentials of user acceptance and satisfaction surveys in the development of stroke rehabilitation systems are discussed. The surveys are conducted as a method for improving the ongoing design process of innovative technical systems developed in the BMBF funded project “BeMobil”.

Abstract Cancer remains a leading cause of death in the world today. Despite decades of research to identify novel therapeutic approaches, durable regressions of metastatic disease are still scanty and survival benefits often negligible. While the current strategy is mostly converging on target-therapies aimed at selectively affecting altered molecular pathways in tumor cells, evidences are in parallel pointing to cell metabolism as a potential Achilles' heel of cancer, to be disrupted for achieving therapeutic benefit. Critical differences in the metabolism of tumor versus normal cells, which include abnormal glycolysis, high lactic acid production, protons accumulation and reversed intra-extracellular pH gradients, make tumor site a hostile microenvironment where only cancer cells can proliferate and survive. Inhibiting these pathways by blocking proton pumps and transporters may deprive cancer cells of a key mechanism of detoxification and thus represent a novel strategy for a pleiotropic and multifaceted suppression of cancer cell growth. Research groups scattered all over the world have recently started to investigate various aspects of proton dynamics in cancer cells with quite encouraging preliminary results. The intent of unifying investigators involved in this research line led to the formation of the "International Society for Proton Dynamics in Cancer" (ISPDC) in January 2010. This is the manifesto of the newly formed society where both basic and clinical investigators are called to foster translational research and stimulate interdisciplinary collaboration for the development of more specific and less toxic therapeutic strategies based on proton dynamics in tumor cell biology.