Organic electronics integration technology and logic circuits

Organic transistor technology has been the subject of intense research in the last decade paving the way for industrialization of organic electronics applications characterized by low fabrication costs, additive manufacturing processes at low-energy, high flexibility and application versatility. A dedicated technology platform has been developed at ST and fully characterized, which is devoted to the manufacturing of all-organic transistor devices with sub-micron feature size as multilayered structures, obtained through a sequential combination of deposition from solution and patterning steps through stamps. The design and manufacturing platform is actually being assessed through the development of the first all-organic 'reduced complexity' microprocessor. An outline of the architecture and major building blocks will be presented

Disability: Cinderella of Public Health?

Background: Disability constitutes a major health problem due to both its high prevalence and to its considerable social and economic costs. Public Health can play a key role in reducing the global burden of disability by identifying, implementing, and evaluating population-based measures to prevent and control injuries and diseases. This task is precisely indicated in MeSH (PubMed database) definition of Public Health: \u201cbranch of medicine concerned with the prevention and control of disease and disability, and the promotion of physical and mental health of the population on the international, national, state, or municipal level\u201d. Objectives: Aim of the study is to weight the knowledge on disability topic in the worldwide literature highlighting the role of Public Health. Method: A bibliometric analysis has been performed retrieving on PubMed database all articles containing the quoted phrase \u201cdisability evaluation\u201d. Main outcome measures were the number of published articles and their distribution per year, language, country of publication and scientific field. Results: Our research retrieved 17,735 articles published in the interval year 1949-2005. In this period 2,094 journals, referring to almost all branches of medicine, have published at least one article on this topics, with a mean number of 8,5 articles per journal. The greatest part of manuscripts (16%) has been published by multidisciplinary journals. The subject area mostly involved is Neurology (15%), followed by Rehabilitation Medicine (9%) and finally Public Health (8%). The highest number of articles about \u201cdisability evaluation\u201d has been published on Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation (355 articles), followed by Spine and The Journal of Rheumatology, with 338 and 276 articles respectively. In Public Health field the greater publisher results a Russian journal, Sovetskoe Zdravookhranenie with 172 articles. Looking at languages, 60% of the manuscripts are written in English, 14% in German and 11% in Russian. Regarding to major subject areas, 88% of Neurology articles and 89% of Rehabilitation Medicine articles are published in English. On the contrary, only 31% of Public Health articles are in English and 37% are written in one of the Eastern-European languages (particularly Russian). Conclusion: During the last decades, many heterogeneous strategies to evaluate disability have been developed to assess disabled people and to collect data about disability burden. All medical disciplines have been involved in this challenge and also Public Health has given a non-negligible contribution. Nevertheless, the greatest part of Public Health articles are written in one of the Eastern-European languages and only a little part in English. Since English publications have the highest IF, the most influential Public Health journals do not seem to contribute very much to disability knowledge. We can suppose, therefore, that disability is perceived as a Public Health problem only in East European countries; on the contrary, in Western countries this topic is usually faced by clinical specialities like Neurology, Rheumatology or Rehabilitation Medicine, while Public Health seems to forget that \u201cprevention and control of disease and disability\u201d is, by definition, one of its leading aims