OC#8 2026

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.

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.

My activity focuses on the domain of the Internet of Things (IoT) and explores its application in various strategic sectors such as eHealth, Industry 4.0, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Cities, and Smart Grids. These domains align with development priorities at the European level. IoT technologies are increasingly being deployed in diverse and resource-constrained environments. Cost constraints are driving manufacturers to select hardware that delivers performance tailored to the specific requirements of each use case, particularly in large-scale public applications (e.g., energy systems and urban infrastructure). In this context, the ability to assess and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) according to the intended system usage is becoming critical. While such mechanisms are being addressed at the network level in 5G—and are anticipated in 6G—QoS considerations remain largely unaddressed at higher software layers, particularly within IoT systems.