- Book Chapter
- 10.1007/978-981-95-2398-6_8
Wearable Social Robots for the Disabled and Impaired
- Jan 01, 2026
- Oliver Bendel
Publications from 2021 to 2026
Showing 10 of 10 papers
Wearable Social Robots for the Disabled and Impaired
“Yes, I Will!”: Expert Perspectives on Digital Support for Patient Participation in Breast Cancer Clinical Trial
The Contribution of the Social-Economic Environment to the Creation of Bronzin’s “Theory of Premium Contracts”
The present chapter argues that Bronzin’s life, during the period of his most active academic work and up until its climax with the publication of his treatise “Theory of Premium Contracts” was biographically typical of his day. Both his personal and psychological development and the specific cultural, social and political biotope in which he lived complemented each other optimally. At the time, the political and socio-cultural climate of Trieste was fundamentally more liberal and open than that of Vienna. This broad-minded and enlightened climate made room for scientific considerations which did not correspond to the usual established patterns and social norms of the day.
Read moreIntroduction
Weighing Proton Therapy’s Clinical Readiness and Costs
Goitein, Lomax, and Pedroni reply: We deeply regret having failed to acknowledge the roles of the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory and the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in developing the proton treatment of ocular tumors. We know better than most how central and vital those roles were to that highly successful program. By April 2002, when the HCL stopped operations, it and the Paul Scherrer Institute were neck and neck in the number of eye tumors treated: HCL had 3466 and PSI had 3538.Bernard Gottschalk, Andreas Koehler, and Richard Wilson take the view that proton therapy has not yet achieved the efficiencies and the reliability to justify the claim that it is a routine clinical option—and that we “glossed over” the problems that remain. In just what state proton therapy now finds itself is a matter of judgment. At Loma Linda University Medical Center, 7176 patients had been treated with protons as of April 2002, and LLUMC now treats more than 1000 patients per year. The new Massachusetts General Hospital facility treated 228 patients in its first full year of operation. Given that only one of MGH’s two gantries was in operation, that figure does not compare badly with the current throughput at LLUMC with its three gantries and 10 years’ experience.In addition to LLUMC and MGH, two hospital-based proton centers are operating in Japan; worldwide, several clinical facilities are under construction and others are in mature planning stages. So our opinion that the “move to the clinic” has taken place seems quite reasonable.Regarding maintenance, although LLUMC appears to have a large support team, HCL achieved a superb three-decade record of availability with about a half dozen maintenance staff members. Nevertheless, Gottschalk and colleagues rightly point out that many unsolved problems remain and that new facilities must carefully assess their staffing needs. Commercial vendors must address these problems and make proton facilities more efficient to operate and, hence, less expensive.Expense seems most important to Schulz and Kagan. Nevertheless, their comments appear to be less a criticism of proton therapy than an argument against the need for improvements in cancer radiotherapy in general. However, we know no radiation oncologists who think that current radiotherapy achieves an ideal local control rate with negligible morbidity; we know many who yearn to do better in both areas. We expect that the assertion that radiotherapy has reached a plateau will prove, like similar past predictions, to be unfounded. We agree that it is important to know whether protons offer better radiotherapy than do conventional x-ray and electron beams and, if so, whether their benefit is worth their additional cost. To address cost-effectiveness, one must know both sides of the equation.Recently, the cost ratio between high-technology proton and x-ray treatments has been evaluated, 1 1. M. Goitein, M. Jermann, Clin. Oncol. 15, S37 (2003) https://doi.org/10.1053/clon.2002.0174. with the conclusions that the cost ratio (taking into account the equipment costs) is now about 2.4 and, with readily achieved improvements and additional, more speculative ones, can probably be reduced to about 1.7. Those numbers are greater than unity, but perhaps not as much greater as Schulz and Kagan imply. The cost ratios between many forms of chemotherapy and conventional x-ray therapy, for example, can be considerably larger—but nevertheless, in practice, are accepted.The other side of the equation is effectiveness. There are two approaches to assessing effectiveness: theoretical arguments based on the physical properties of protons and arguments based on clinical results. Our article concentrated on the former; we could not give more than a superficial overview of the latter. However, the physics arguments are very strong. Protons indisputably can deliver a smaller dose to tissues outside the target volume. There are many reasons to think that this would be beneficial and few to indicate it might be deleterious. Clinically, ocular melanomas and skullbase chordomas and chondrosarcomas in several series with many patients and with long follow-ups—together with paranasal sinus tumors in unpublished data—have been shown to be more effectively treated with protons than with other techniques. That the successes so far are in uncommon tumors has less to do with their rarity than with their accessibility to the restricted-penetration beams, the only beams that have so far received a mature clinical evaluation. Schulz and Kagan seem to imply that they could support “the establishment of a few national referral centers.” So, the issue becomes “how many” rather than “whether.”Our judgment is that a clinical and worthwhile benefit has been shown for some tumors, and experience reinforces the expectation that we will see similar improvements in many other cancers as more clinical facilities gain experience with protons. REFERENCESection:ChooseTop of pageREFERENCE <<CITING ARTICLES1. M. Goitein, M. Jermann, Clin. Oncol. 15, S37 (2003) https://doi.org/10.1053/clon.2002.0174. Google ScholarCrossref© 2003 American Institute of Physics.
Read moreInP-InGaAs single HBT technology for photoreceiver OEIC's at 40 Gb/s and beyond
We describe an advanced InP-InGaAs-based technology for the monolithic integration of pin-photodiodes and SHBT-transistors. Both devices are processed using the same epitaxial grown layer structure. Employing this technology, we have designed and fabricated two photoreceivers achieving transimpedance gains of 170 /spl Omega//380 /spl Omega/ and optical/electrical bandwidths of 50 GHz/34 GHz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest bandwidth of any heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT)-based photoreceiver optoelectronic integrated circuit (OEIC) published to date. We even predict a bandwidth of 60 GHz for the same circuit topology by a simple reduction of the photodiode diameter and an adjustment of the feedback resistor value.
Read moreSocial discounting of orthogonal capital flow rates
Functional logistic mapping
On the Security of the IDEA Block Cipher
IDEA is an iterated block cipher proposed by Lai and Massey and is based on the design concept of “mixing operations from different algebraic groups”. New arithmetic properties of the basic operations used in the round function are found and investigated with respect to the security of this block cipher. Evidence is given that these properties can be exploited in the cryptanalysis of the first 2 rounds of IDEA but that they are of no assistance in the cryptanalysis of the full IDEA block cipher containing 8 rounds.KeywordsBlock CipherOutput DifferenceArithmetic PropertyRound FunctionOutput TransformationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Read moreCorrelation Properties of Combiners with Memory in Stream Ciphers (Extended Abstract)
In stream cipher design pseudo random generators have been proposed which combine the output of one or several LFSRs in order to produce the key stream. For memoryless combiners it is known that the produced sequence has correlation to sums of certain LFSR-sequences whose correlation coefficients c i satisfy the equation Σi c i 2 = 1. It is proved that a corresponding result also holds for combiners with memory.If correlation probabilities are conditioned on side information, e.g. on known output digits, it is shown that new or stronger correlations may occur. This is exemplified for the summation cipher with two LFSRs where such correlations can be exploited in a known plaintext attack. A cryptanalytic algorithm is given which is shown to be successful for LFSRs of considerable length and with arbitrary feedback connection.KeywordsBoolean FunctionCorrelation PropertySide InformationGeneral CombinerStream CipherThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Read more