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According to the World Health Organization1,2 the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the next years. This trend will put a strain on the health and social systems of most countries. The adoption of robots could assist these health systems in responding to this increased demand, particularly in high intensity and repetitive tasks. In a previous work, we compared a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) with a Virtual Agent (VA) during the execution of a rehabilitation task. The SAR consisted of a humanoid R1 robot, while the Virtual Agent represented its simulated counter-part. In both cases, the agents evaluated the participants’ motions and provided verbal feedback. Participants reported higher levels of engagement when training with the SAR. Given that the architecture has been proven to be successful for a rehabilitation task, other sets of repetitive tasks could also take advantage of the platform, such as clinical tests. A commonly performed clinical trial is the Timed Up and Go (TUG), where the patient has to stand up, walk 3 m to a goal line and back, and sit down. To handle this test, we extended the architecture to evaluate lower limbs’ motions, follow the participants while continuously interacting with them, and verify that the test is completed successfully. We implemented the scenario in Gazebo, by simulating both participants and the interaction with the robot3. A full interactive report is created when the test is over, providing the extracted information to the specialist. We validate the architecture in three different experiments, each with 1,000 trials, using the Gazebo simulation. These experiments evaluate the ability of this architecture to analyse the patient, verify if they are able to complete the TUG test, and the accuracy of the measurements obtained during the test. This work provides the foundations towards more thorough clinical experiments with a large number of participants with a physical platform in the future. The software is publicly available in the assistive-rehab repository4 and fully documented.

Changes effected by environmental factors on the biological colonization of an historic marine limestone quay were considered, as a baseline study for the monitoring and test plan definition. Environmental factors play a fundamental role in the deterioration of stone monuments, particularly those located in a marine environment. This eighteenth century quay, situated at the Royal Square of the Portuguese capital, is subject to tidal movement, marine aerosol, high levels of pollution and vibration and is partly submerged in polluted water. Part of the quay was dismantled in 1997 and returned to the river water in 2008; since then, progressive (re)colonization by biological organisms has occurred. By means of periodic photographic registry, from 2010 to 2014, the main alterations and deposits on its surfaces were registered. The present paper discusses and presents a vulnerability assessment and monitoring plan for monuments in a marine environment with a view to establishing a preventive conservation plan.

Recurrent neural networks have recently shown significant potential in different language applications, ranging from natural language processing to language modelling. This paper introduces a research effort to use such networks to develop and evaluate natural language acquisition on a humanoid robot. Here, the problem is twofold. First, the focus will be put on using the gesture-word combination stage observed in infants to transition from single to multi-word utterances. Secondly, research will be carried out in the domain of connecting action learning with language learning. In the former, the long-short term memory architecture will be implemented, whilst in the latter multiple time-scale recurrent neural networks will be used. This will allow for comparison between the two architectures, whilst highlighting the strengths and shortcomings of both with respect to the language learning problem. Here, the main research efforts, challenges and expected outcomes are described.

The Seaside Architecture Inventory of Oeiras includes fifty single fam ily houses, built for sea vacation , between 1860 and 1925, in the territory of the current Oeiras' mun icipality and still existent. This study involves, in a multidisciplinary approach , the systematization and the descri ption of the buildings and also the assessment of its risk level. The research was constituted through field work, supported by documen tary and bibliographical research. This paper presents the method used to the assessment of this buildings' physical risk. During the nineteenth century, the seaside became popular for therapy, and later for leisure. This led to the construction of holiday seaside houses, normally in an eclectic style. The primitive researches on the theme of seaside architecture were developed in France, in the early 1980's, using the expression architecture de ville giature (Mignot 2004). Since then, other research projects were developed, in some

O edifício da "antiga garagem, cocheira e cavalariça da casa de António Santos Jorge", no Estoril, foi mandado edificar em 1914, segundo traço de Norte Júnior, ampliando assim a área construída afecta à casa de veraneio da família. Caracteriza-se o edifício, arquitectónica e construtivamente, em resultado da sua observação exterior. Saliente-se a impossibilidade de confrontar os elementos recolhidos no exterior com aqueles que uma observação do interior permitiria.Apresentam-se o seu projecto de construção e a cronologia do edifício para os anos de 1965 a 2005, período de tempo de que o Arquivo da Câmara Municipal de Cascais detém documentação. O principal objectivo deste artigo é contribuir para o conhecimento material e construtivo das Cocheiras Santos Jorge, um singular conjunto actualmente abandonado, e assim concorrer para uma correcta intervenção.