Interactive Systems in Healthcare Special Issue

This publication comprises six selected contributions whose subject matters are all related with applications of innovative engineering tools and schemes to the emergent sector of interactive systems: advanced robotics technology, cognitive paradigms for decision making, system quality enhancement methods, and digital manufacturing concepts. A first group of papers is concerned with the introduction of service robots into the hospital environment: employment of robot swarms to support a whole range of diverse hospital service functionalities; development of suitable human robot interfaces to enable efficient and effortless robot-user communication; implementation of plug-and-play hospital robot service modules for cleaning, delivery, patient guidance, patient condition monitoring, and surveillance. A second group of papers refers to critical aspects of health care systems analysed through novel engineering problem solving strategies already successfully applied to aerospace and other high-risk industrial fields: root cause analysis, process mapping and failure mode investigation for risk assessment and continuous system quality improvement; supervised delay-adaptation spiking neural networks to support decision making in treating dental malocclusions; product customisation through virtual prototyping in the design and manufacturing of hearing aid shells.