E-Health, Healthy living and ageing

Rehabilitation robotics are among the earliest real-world uses of medical robots and have paved the way for broader adoption of robotics and AI in healthcare and daily living environments with vulnerable users. Clear, harmonised safety requirements and reproducible test methods
are essential - not only to protect patients and clinicians, but also to give manufacturers and providers the confidence to deploy these technologies responsibly. By codifying “state-of the-art” expectations, the standards framework enables innovation while safeguarding users.
Societal benefits enabled by robust standards include:
Patient safety and dignity: Defined limits, fail-safe behaviours, and human–robot interaction requirements reduce the risk of harm and ensure predictable performance in rehabilitation settings.
Healthcare access: Standardised safety/performance criteria help scale high-quality therapy beyond specialised centres, supporting adoption in regional hospitals and community care.
Clinician support and quality of care: Reliable, well-tested systems can deliver high-dose, repeatable training while reducing therapist physical strain, freeing time for complex clinical tasks.
Public trust and uptake: Transparent, consensus-based requirements underpin procurement, reimbursement, and clinical guidelines—building societal confidence in robotic care.
Innovation with accountability: Clear targets shorten development cycles, lower compliance ambiguity for SMEs, and focus competition on outcomes and usability rather than ad-hoc safety interpretations.
The degree-of-autonomy guidance further generalises these protections to any medical product using robotic or AI technologies. By providing a common language for autonomy levels and the associated safety controls and human oversight, it supports ethically aligned, trustworthy deployment of AI-enabled medical devices across care pathways, from clinics to homes.

By promoting interoperability and scalable health and well-being indicators, this initiative advances inclusive, data-driven solutions for sustainable urban development. I contribute extensively by providing guidance on integrating existing management system elements and concerns with technology—particularly emphasizing digital health and IoT integration—to promote health and well-being effectively within urban management systems.

This activity contributes to the several societal changes, icnluding:
Improved evidence-based policy making by ensuring sensor data reliability.
Environmental awareness as a motor for environmental behaviour change by making air quality measurements affordable to a larger community.
At a large scale, healthier living in cities by improving the common awareness of the air quality of cities and possible mitigation actions.
More sustainable industrial activity by improving the knowledge about generated pollution and odour nuisances.
Improved data availability for scientific models, early warning and forecasting by ensuring larger availability with lower cost systems, with sufficient data quality and accuracy.
The possibility to enforce effective compliance regarding odorous emissions with improved, cost-effective methods.

This standardisation effort on air quality has several societal key impacts, including:
Improved evidence-based policy making by ensuring sensor data reliability.
Environmental awareness as a motor for environmental behaviour change by making air quality measurements affordable to a larger community.
At a large scale, healthier living in cities by improving the common awareness of the air quality of cities and possible mitigation actions.
More sustainable industrial activity by improving the knowledge about generated pollution and odour nuisances.
Improved data availability for scientific models, early warning and forecasting by ensuring larger availability with lower cost systems, with sufficient data quality and accuracy.
The possibility to enforce effective compliance regarding odorous emissions with improved, cost-effective methods.

For society, AI standardisation promises to improve quality, safety, and equity in healthcare. It will foster public trust through compliance with ethical and privacy principles aligned with European values such as transparency. These improvements can translate into more accurate diagnoses and personalized treatments, benefiting patients and professionals.

Accelerating the use of digital twins, as the existence of the semantic repository allows the digital twin to manage semantics while the physical twin is managing data. This methodology will ensure a consistent continuum between the physical twin and the digital twin.

The following impacts are identified at a general level:
The Internet of Things (IoT) addresses many societal challenges including climate change, resource and energy efficiency and ageing.
In the emerging IoT economy, voluntary global standards can accelerate adoption, drive competition, and enable cost-effective introduction of new technologies.
Standardisation facilitates the interoperability, compatibility, reliability, security and efficiency of operations on a global scale among different technical solutions, stimulating industry innovation and providing greater clarity to technology evolution.
Interoperability between IoT networks operated by different companies along the value chain opens up opportunities to address EU Policy objectives, e.g. greater resource efficiency for a more circular economy, sustainable and responsible supply chains through transparency and traceability, and others

The number of connected devices is expected to exceed 20 billion by 2020. This market will be fostered by proper interoperability standards. Europe is strong in IoT innovation and has made significant technical contributions (AIOTI) including in some specific standardization contexts. AIOTI now has a recognized presence at the ISO level, and it is now key to concretize this presence so that European innovation is well represented.