Smart environments offer valuable technologies for activity monitoring and health assessment. Here, we describe an integration of robots into smart environments to provide more interactive support of individuals with functional limitations. RAS, our Robot Activity Support system, partners smart environment sensing, object detection and mapping, and robot interaction to detect and assist with activity errors that may occur in everyday settings. We describe the components of the RAS system and demonstrate its use in a smart home testbed. To evaluate the usability of RAS, we also collected and analyzed feedback from participants who received assistance from RAS in a smart home setting as they performed routine activities.

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In the last decade, bioprinting has emerged as a facile technique for fabricating tissues constructs mimicking the architectural complexity and compositional heterogeneity of native tissues. Amongst different bioprinting modalities, extrusion-based bioprinting (EBB) is the most widely used technique. Coaxial bioprinting, a type of EBB, enables fabrication of concentric cell-material layers and enlarges the scope of EBB to mimic several key aspects of native tissues. Over the period of development of bioprinting, tissue constructs integrated with vascular networks, have been one of the major achievements made possible largely by coaxial bioprinting. In this review, current advancements in biofabrication of constructs with coaxial bioprinting are discussed with a focus on different bioinks that are particularly suitable for this modality. This review also expounds the properties of different bioinks suitable for coaxial bioprinting and then analyses the key achievements made by the application of coaxial bioprinting in tissue engineering, drug delivery and in-vitro disease modelling. The major limitations and future perspectives on the critical factors that will determine the ultimate clinical translation of the versatile technique are also presented to the reader.

Fatigue testing is a time and resource-consuming task. Historically, SN testing was conducted at many stress levels on simple representative specimen in order to determine an SN curve, which could then be used to design a component from the same type of material. Recently, an energy-based fatigue life prediction method has been in development. The goal of this method is to quickly determine a material’s fatigue characteristics using simple test procedures. The main theory behind the energy-based fatigue life prediction method is that the strain energy in a monotonic tensile test is equal to the cumulative hysteresis energy of a cyclic test. This theory has always been tested using a single stress level on each specimen. The hysteresis loop information was then used to make fatigue life predictions at other stress levels. Further testing has been done to learn more about the hysteresis energy behavior throughout the lifetime of a specimen, but only for a single stress value. In this study, several stress levels were tested on a single specimen. This new information will help make fatigue life predictions by completely removing the difficult and inconsistent process of determining experimental curve fit coefficients traditionally used in the energy-based fatigue life prediction method.