The demands of introducing a more practical means of managing and monitoring technology within the home environment to support independent living are increasing. Efforts have been made recently to address these concerns, however, they may be considered to be lacking in mathematical rigour or have not benefited from incorporating the needs and expectations of the healthcare professionals. In this paper, we present a prototype solution, referred to as HomeTL, which allows healthcare professionals to establish the conditions/rules within which technology in the home should operate. The HomeTL concept is based on previous work in the area of visual notation and linear temporal logic. A visual editor for HomeTL has been developed and is presented in this paper. Following a description of the methodology and the prototype developed, results from a usability study, conducted on three computer scientists specializing in the area of healthcare management, are presented. The initial results based on this survey are positive and show that the topic deserves further investigation.

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The Medical Expert Support Tool (MEST) is aimed at helping the clinician in recognizing risk factors in the patient status by offering a multiparametric overview, and by highlighting the individual situation using meaningful colors (green, yellow and red) in order to compare the person physiological parameters with the computed profile. The medical professionals configure the conditions (relevant parameters, thresholds, rules and alerts) setting the values to the decision support modules and receiving the risk assessment results. Finally, interventions should be done depending on the evaluation of the patient. The tool has been designed along with the clinician involved in the project and it will be fully tested and evaluated during the observational study (100 patients) starting on June 2012.

The paper presents an unusual design paradigm for the development of advanced operating rooms and its implementation. The aim of this approach is moving forward the state of art in operating room design and management. First, the used paradigm to implement the mentioned design methodology is described comparing the operating room context environment with a music perspective. This approach has inspired the development of independent systems which are linked together thanks to a communication common framework called OPERA. Secondly, the OPERA system consisting of heterogeneous set of novel robotic devices and innovative information technology techniques are described. The OPERA hardware and software subsystems modules perform their peculiar activities as a whole like orchestral musicians performing an opera. In particular robotic subsystems (developed by The