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Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) is one of the most strategic research fields of research due to the increasing aging of the world population and the developments of assistive technologies, which enable people with specific demands to live longer and better by providing specific care. It has been demonstrated that AAL technologies provide effective support to frail people and their application is increasing in home and medical contexts with positive effects on costs reduction. However, such models have been rarely applied outside the domestic context. This paper describes the application of AAL concepts to manufacturing in order to support frail people to properly handle machine tools and complex systems. It presents an industrial case study focusing on machine tool operators: under these circumstances frailty assumes a broad sense as people have to carry out highly specialized jobs and also mild deficiencies can represent a frailty (i.e. slight reduction in sight, hands that are not perfectly steady, slightly reduced mobility or human force). The case study in particular aims at designing an adaptive user interface based on AAL principles and user-centered approach to support frail operators to work better and more safely.

In the last years introducing measures to face age discrimination and increasing work safety in production environments have become crucial goals. The present research proposes an innovative user interface exploiting Augmented Reality techniques to support frail people, mainly elderly, in everyday work on complex automated machines. It adapts its functionalities according to the user skill, tasks, age, and cognitive and physical abilities thanks to a set of knowledge-based configuration rules. A case study is described to illustrate the methodology to manage the complexity of configuration rules and the resulting developed platform.

Nowadays Virtual Prototyping (VP) of robots dynamics is an effective tool to simulate the system behavior and improve the quality of rehabilitation activities. Using a VP software environment, the patients can be visually guided in their actions and the physiotherapist can control the system parameters easily to investigate the patients' performances in real time. In this paper VP concept is introducted to support the use of an upper-limb orthosis and to improve therapeutic efficacy in rehabilitation. The system adopted is a human-worn rehabilitation exoskeleton enhanced with a VP-based application to make therapeutic exercises more accessible while reducing the effort in using the system and managing the therapy. The VP application in particular merges computational musculoskeletal analysis with simplified controls, 3D viewing and real time simulation of the patients' movements. The application has been designed to specifically address the needs of patients and therapists and improve the satisfaction in use of the global system as well as the therpy results. The system validation is based on an ad-hoc evaluation protocol and is carried out by directly involving final users furing rehabilitation sessions. Experimental results demonstrated how VP prototyping effectively support the system use from both patients and physiotherapists: on one hand patients are nove motivated and they learn extract movements faster; on the other hand physiotherapists are supportedin diagnosis and data elaboration, and finally the rehabilitation therapy efficiency is improved.

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting independent living. However, an inventory of characteristics of smart assistive devices currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products and in particular to analyse their functionalities in order to understand if they can be considered inclusive and if they effectively match the needs of elderly. This review can be useful for researchers and designers of Ambient Intelligent Environments, to realise where efforts should be focused in order to match the demand from the elderly people’s side.

In the last years, some attempts have been made to explore the use of smart objects, with the purpose of monitoring well-being and supporting people’s independent living. However an inventory of characteristics of smart products currently available on the market is still lacking. The aim of this study is to provide an overview of such products in order to: (1) understand if their features really match users’ needs, answering to the definition of assistive technology and, consequently, (2) understand if an environment embedded with SOs can be considered as assistive too, taking into consideration the attributes given by the definition of the SOs, of being embedded in familiar objects and immerse in the users’ surround.

Nowadays, upper-limb injury or impairment represent a widespread problem, related to sport accidents or traumas, surgery operations, stroke and so on. The typical approach to the rehabilitation is one or more physiotherapy sessions, to restore muscular mass and strength. Despite this, over the years, several works proposed innovative solutions, including electromechanical orthoses, which work in relation to the muscular activity, measured by techniques such as superficial electromyography (sEMG). Yet, these systems are still far from commercialization because of their cost, complexity and difficulties in using. A currently unmet need regards the ability of the therapist to control and manage data through a remote interface, by exploiting some of the latest technological resources on the market (smartphones, tablets). The present works aims at designing an upper-limb rehabilitation system, based on an orthosis, sEMG wireless sensors and a dedicated software architecture to overcome these limitations. This will lead to an important change of perspective in physiotherapy procedures since data collection and correlation will produce innovative medical protocols, addressed to people affected by several types of injury or impairment.Copyright © 2013 by ASME

The paper analyzes the performance of a reverberation chamber equipped by a “carousel” stirring system. The working volume is positioned inside the stirrer rotating volume. More precisely, the carousel consists of several vertical strips that rotate around a central axis and having a total diameter as large as possible compared to chamber dimensions. An FDTD code, optimized for reverberation chamber simulations and tested with experimental results, is used to analyze the chamber performance as function of strip number and width. The proposed setup increases the working volume and improves the reverberation chamber behavior with respect to a traditional setup. Moreover, it needs just one motor to control the stirrer, and it does not require more complex mechanical part. All simulations are compared to measurements showing a good agreement.