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Computer corpus linguistics (CCL) is a scientific innovation that has facilitated the creation and analysis of large corpora in a systematic way by means of computer technology since the 1950s. This article provides an account of the CCL pioneers in general but particularly of those in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. It is found that Germany and Sweden, due to more advantageous financing and weaker communities of generativists, had a faster adoption of CCL than the other two countries. A particular late adopter among the four was Switzerland, which did not take up CCL until foreign professors had been recruited.

Over 8 per cent of the Dutch nursing home population is bedfast, and this number is slowly increasing. The quality of life (QoL) of this population is lower than that of residents who are still mobile. Little research has been conducted on how to improve the QoL of this bedfast population, particularly through making technological adjustments to the bed and the direct surroundings. The purpose of this paper is to gain insight into the QoL of bedfast residents and how to improve this through technology.

A mixed-method multi-case study with thematic analysis was conducted in two nursing homes with seven participants based on semi-structured interviews and Short Form-12 questionnaire.

The major causes of the experienced low QoL were the limited opportunities for engaging in social contacts with others, and coping with the dependency on other people and having limited control. Participants suggested improvements of QoL through the application of modern communication technologies to engage in social contacts and to control the bed itself and environment around the bed.

The results may help improve the design of the bed and the direct environment in order to improve the QoL of bedfast nursing home residents.

The QoL of bedfast nursing home residents has not been studied before in relation to the bed itself and technological solutions that may help improve the QoL and level of control.

This chapter seeks to investigate the journey of breast and bowel cancer patients at the HMC Antoniushove. It zooms in on specific touch points and the possibilities for improvements. Furthermore, it elucidates the learning process and more particular the dissemination between the hospital (staff and medical students) and hospitality students and professionals and emphasizes that looking from different perspectives and various disciplines is beneficial for all the stakeholders involved in hospitals.

Diseases are increasingly chronic; patients are more demanding and competition between different hospitals is increasing. That is why, in addition to excellent medical treatment, excellent service (referred to here as hospitality) is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare sector, including in hospitals. What does it have to meet? What do patients appreciate, what needs to be improved and how can these improvements be designed and implemented with the involvement of both patients and hospital staff?

Medical and hospitality students collaborated in this project analysing and describing the journey of patients with breast and bowel cancer. They examined the patient journey and elucidated the touch points, which patients indicated as critical during their ‘journey’.

Most important finding resulted from the learning process of this collaboration and the insight gained, a greater awareness and understanding of the non-medical needs and wishes, i.e. hospitality, of patients. Furthermore, the mutual understanding between the evidence-based stance of thinking of medical students and hospital staff at the one side and the more on soft skills–focused attitude of hospitality students on the other hand increased.

Empowered patients are allies to the healthcare system, especially in emergency situations. Social media use has emerged to be a major means by which patients interact with the healthcare system, and in times such as the current COVID-19 situation social media has to play an even greater crisis management role by empowering patients. Social media channels serve numerous beneficial purposes, despite them also being blamed for the spread of misinformation during this crisis. In this Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) focused case study, we will discuss the increasingly greater role being played by the social media in healthcare in the region and how that empowers not just the patients but the system as a whole. In the GCC region, the healthcare sector is found to reflect a steady growth, leading to an increased drive for empowering patients by lowering the barriers to effective communication and consultation through online media. As of today, social media has become an element of the telehealth infrastructure being deployed in the region. During COVID-19, patients are seen to leverage it pointedly for online health consultations thereby lowering the stress on the healthcare system and adding to efficiencies.

Online health communities (OHCs) are attracting more and more healthy consumers, including patients, their families, caregivers and the general public. This paper aims to explore the themes and characteristics of patient-generated content (PGC) in Chinese OHCs.

Baidu Tieba for hypertension was selected as the research site. Online ethnography (netnography) approach was utilized to explore the PGC and health communication in the online hypertension community. The final database included 300 randomly sampled threads and their 3,187 reply posts and was further analyzed from three perspectives: health information needs, attitudes and psychological reactions to hypertension and social support exchange.

The members' health information needs were mainly concentrated on five aspects: causes, symptoms, measuring instrument, tests and diagnosis and treatment. Their attitudes and psychological reactions to hypertension varied with the context, for example, disease stage, health condition. Within the health communication, three types of social support – information support, emotional support and network support – were generated, transmitted and exchanged among members.

OHCs are able to serve as important source of health information and tool for health education. The implications and suggestions for health promotion of individuals, health information services optimization of OHCs and national health strategy plans were also discussed.

This is the first netnography study in information field on Chinese online hypertension community. This study provides a new perspective to explore the needs, attitudes and social support behaviors of Chinese hypertension population and also enables the Chinese experience of using OHCs to reduce health disparities to come to the world.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the general operationalization of an “active patient,” by examining the specific activities and skills expected of active patients.

Expected activities and necessary skills were studied through a qualitative case study into the development and use of an assistive technology (i.e. web site) aimed at stimulating active patient-ship. Interviews, observations and document analysis were used to capture and explore designers’ inscribing practices and their consequences regarding expected competences and activities of patients using the web site.

Designers inscribed two “co-design roles” that active patients were expected to perform on the web site (co-designing their own healthcare and co-designing the healthcare of peers), for which at least eight different competencies were needed. The absence of skills or facilities to apply these skills resulted in incomplete use, a different use than intended by designers and non-use of the web site.

Technological choices and inscribing processes determine who is able or facilitated to become active and who is not. Due to inscribed co-design roles, it also influences the extent to which already active peers are able to perform health-related activities. Different users with different conditions should be taken into account in the design as specific group characteristics can influence level of individual activity.

This study is, as far as the authors know, the first that examines the “active patient” concept by studying an assistive technology and using scripting literature, resulting in an improved understanding of what it means to become “active” in terms of skills and activities.

It is widely recognized that interior office space can affect health in several ways. Strategic and evidence-based design, including explicit design objectives, well-chosen design solutions and evaluation of results, aid realization of desired health effects. Therefore, this paper aims to identify possibly effective interior design strategies and accompanying design solutions and to provide examples of effectiveness measures.

A literature sample of 59 peer-reviewed papers published across disciplines was used to collect examples of workplace design features that have positively influenced workers’ well-being. The papers were grouped by their health objective and design scope successively and their theoretical assumptions, measures and findings were analyzed.

Four main workplace design strategies were identified. Design for comfort aims at reducing or preventing health complaints, discomfort and stress, following a pathogenic approach. It has the longest tradition and is the most frequently addressed in the included papers. The other three take a salutogenic approach, promoting health by increasing resources for coping with demands through positive design. Design for restoration supports physical and mental recovery through connections with nature. Design for social well-being facilitates social cohesion and feelings of belonging. Design for healthy behavior aims at nudging physical activity in the workplace.

By drawing complementary perspectives and offering examples of design solutions and effectiveness measures, this paper encourages workplace designers, managers and researchers to take a transdisciplinary and evidence-based approach to healthy workplaces. It also serves as a starting point for future empirical research.

This study aims to develop a better understanding of how online health community (OHC) members with different health literacy (HL) levels benefit from their participation, through the analysis and comparison of their resource integration (RI) processes. It investigates through a RI lens how the vulnerability of community members – captured as their level of HL – affects the benefits they derive from participation.

Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to investigate the effects of healthcare service users’ vulnerability. Data were collected about their profiles and levels of HL. Furthermore, 15 in-depth interviews were conducted.

The study demonstrates how low levels of HL act as a barrier to the integration of available online health resources. Participation in OHCs appears less beneficial for vulnerable users. Three types of benefits were identified at the individual level, namely, psychological quality-of-life, physical quality-of-life and learning. Benefits identified at the community level were: content generation and participation in the development of the community.

This study has implications for the understanding of how service users’ activities affect their own outcomes and how the vulnerability of users could be anticipated and considered in the design of the community.

This paper aims to present a fully actuated aerial manipulator (AM) with a robust motion/force hybrid controller for conducting contact-typed inspection tasks in industrial plants.

An AM is designed based on a hexarotor with tilted rotors and a rigidly attached end effector. By tilting the rotors, the position and attitude of the AM can be controlled independently, and the AM can actively exert forces on industrial facilities through the rigidly attached end effector. A motion/force hybrid controller is proposed to perform contact-typed inspection tasks. The contact-typed inspection task is divided into the approach phase and the contact phase. In the approach phase, the AM automatically approaches the contact surface. In the contact phase, a motion/force hybrid controller is used for contact-typed inspection. Finally, a disturbance observer (DOB) is used to estimate external disturbances and used as feedforward compensation.

The proposed AM can slowly approach the contact surface without significant impact in the contact phase. It can realize constant force control in the direction normal to the contact surface in the contact phase, whereas the motion of the remaining directions can be controlled by the operator. The use of the DOB ensures the robustness of the AM in the presence of external wind disturbances.

A fully actuated AM system with a robust motion/force hybrid controller is proposed. The effectiveness of the proposed AM system for conducting contact-typed industrial inspection tasks is validated by practical experiments.