Nutritional concerns, health and survival in old age

The ageing process is—apart from chance or good luck—not only influenced by factors intrinsic to the individual, but also by extrinsic factors that include environmental and lifestyle variables. This paper deals with the epidemiological evidence for the role of dietary patterns and key nutritional concerns in relation to survival and ageing related disorders that present themselves in later life. Dietary patterns, such as the Mediterranean diet, characterized by mainly plant foods including protective factors e.g. vegetables, nuts and monounsaturated fatty acids and excluding harmful factors e.g. trans-fatty acids and foods with a high glycemic factor, appear to be relevant even in old age. Specific nutritional concerns focus on general undernutrition, vitamin D and vitamin B12. Prevalence of nutritional inadequacies, diagnostic criteria, causes and health consequences are described. The paper ends with recommendations for guidance on healthy diets for elderly people. An important challenge should be research to further expand the knowledge base, acknowledging the complexity of the ageing process and integrating different dimensions of research into human healthy ageing in properly designed studies. In the mean time reversing poor adherence to existing guidelines for a healthy diet remains a first challenge in public health nutritional practices

A Novel Greeting Selection System for a Culture-Adaptive Humanoid Robot

This is an open access article published by INTECH and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.Robots, especially humanoids, are expected to perform human-like actions and adapt to our ways of communication in order to facilitate their acceptance in human society. Among humans, rules of communication change depending on background culture: greetings are a part of communication in which cultural differences are strong. Robots should adapt to these specific differences in order to communicate effectively, being able to select the appropriate manner of greeting for different cultures depending on the social context. In this paper, we present the modelling of social factors that influence greeting choice, and the resulting novel culture-dependent greeting gesture and words selection system. An experiment with German participants was run using the humanoid robot ARMARIIIb. Thanks to this system, the robot, after interacting with Germans, can perform greeting gestures appropriate to German culture in addition to a repertoire of greetings appropriate to Japanese culture