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La naissance de la science politique moderne dans la Methodus de Jean Bodin : l'héritage de Budé et Connan, du droit à la politique
No full textOur research aims to examine how the innovative conception of "political science", developed by Jean Bodin (1529/30-1596) in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566; 1572), falls within the scope of a humanist program which restores legal science in the name of scientia civilis. We therefore propose to investigate the line of thoughts which regard the scientia civilis in the works of two of his predecessors, Guillaume Budé and François Connan, who develop this "science" for the sake of magistrates-judges of the Parlements by devising a "method" which intends to unify legal theory with practical knowledge. Their considerations lead them to establish a new paradigm of jusnaturalism and to re-establish, in modern times, the very notion of law on the basis of right reason, id est, on the basis of a community of laws dominated only by reason: civitas universa. We bring light to the fact that, when this community is identified with the international society of his time, supposedly ruled by the ius gentium which incarnates reason, Bodin bestows upon his scientia civilis a political character. If the jusnaturalist paradigm allows him to assume the transition from a barbarous state to a human society, it is his famous theory of sovereignty (summum imperium) that, by defining the coercive power delegated to the magistrates of Parlements, allows them to realize this transition. We propose that his "method" of reading the history enables him to materialize the political science, which determines, beyond the limits of legal science, the role the government plays in realizing the human society, or in other words, the new civitas universa, governed by the ius gentium
La Vie des Pères. Genèse et diffusion d'un recueil de contes exemplaires du XIIIe siècle
Full text linkLa Vie des Pères, raccolta di racconti esemplari dell’inizio del XIII secolo, aspira alla formazione religiosa cristiana proponendo nella narrazione e nei para-sermoni dell’autore (i prologhi e gli epiloghi ai racconti) un insegnamento teologico. In una prospettiva critica letteraria e storica, questa ricerca analizza la genesi e la ricezione del testo. Le intenzioni poetiche dell’autore determinano l’aggiornamento di una materia narrativa preesistente ai temi spirituali dominanti intorno al 1215 (la confessione, l’eucarestia, il celibato dei chierici). Il pubblico medievale (XIII-XV secolo) ha interpretato il testo a partire dai supporti fisici che lo hanno trasmesso. La tradizione manoscritta è così studiata come un insieme di testimoni di presentazione del testo, più o meno modificato e adattato a diversi contesti (altre opere religiose, testi profani, testi non narrativi) e per diverse comunità interpretative: i possessori dei manoscritti, i lettori che hanno annotato i margini, i copisti che hanno strutturato l’opera con le rubriche. Ne emerge una sostanziale coerenza dell’opera tra la funzione esemplare e l’utilizzo effettivo
Heat pump and photovoltaic systems in residential applications - Performance, potential, and control of the system
Full text linkAir-source heat pumps coupled with photovoltaic systems are going to be a more and more promising technology, as its widespread application in residential houses will help achieving the decarbonisation of the building sector, which is strongly promoted by the European Union.
The aspects that inspire confidence for this solution are that: i) the average quality of heat pumps has recently improved; ii) new and renovated buildings, with well insulated envelopes, are more suitable for low-temperature heating systems; iii) photovoltaic modules price is significantly decreased and still shows a diminishing trend; iv) the share of the electricity production from renewable sources is progressively increasing, making the use of electricity more ecologically favourable and v) heat pump and photovoltaic systems can make the residential sector flexible and ready to face the changes in the electricity system.
The aim of this thesis is to analyse the manifold relationships between the building, the HVAC system and the boundary conditions, as well as the interaction of this system with the electricity grid. The work is almost entirely based on the dynamic simulation, which is performed by using more or less detailed models, depending on the objective of the single study. The heat pump is a crucial element, since its behaviour is influenced by many factors. Therefore, particular attention is pointed toward the modelling of this component and its control. The general approach mainly adopted is the comparison between a reference system, defined case by case, and other similar scenarios in which one or more variations are introduced. Since different aspects are investigated, the variations can concern either the system component (building and HVAC system), the boundary conditions or the control strategy. In particular, one of the studies provide an extensive analysis on how the climate impacts the behaviour of the system, involving nine European cities in a wide range of latitude. The role of the thermal storage (water tank and building thermal mass) is also studied, showing that its potential is exploited only when it is properly controlled. The last part of the thesis focuses on the system control, which influences the system performance more than expected. Despite this, the benefits of applying the proposed smart control strategies are not as great as those deriving from the addition of the electrical storage, in a system in which only the thermal storage is present. Even better results can be obtained by applying control strategies that also manage the battery charging/discharging. A general conclusion is that rule-based control strategies would be cheap and e↵ective; however, they require a tailored implementation and their development for the mass-market is not easy
Polymer composites for sustainable 3D printing materials
Full text linkBiodegradable and bio-based polymers have raised great attention since sustainable development policies tend to become more and more important with the growing concern for the environment and the decreasing reserve of fossil fuel [1]. The increasing demand for environmentally friendly materials attracted the attention on biopolymers reinforced with cellulose, that is a virtually inexhaustible source of raw material [2] and on new manufacturing ways such as additive manufacturing (AM) [3]. The most diffused AM technology for polymers is Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), a technique where a filament of thermoplastic polymer is extruded through a nozzle and deposited layer by layer to form the final object with the support of computer aided design.
The aim of this work is the development of different kind of thermoplastic biodegradable composites based on commercially available polymers reinforced with cellulose and to study their applicability in fused deposition modeling (FDM). The final goal is the production of plastic filaments suitable to feed a commercially available FDM 3D-printing machine.
Starting from microcrystalline cellulose (MCC), two different types of nanocellulose: crystalline nanocellulose (CNC) and nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) were produced and studied to be applied as natural reinforcing fillers for selected types of biopolymers. Cellulose nanocrystals in water solution were prepared from micro-cellulose through a sulfuric acid hydrolysis while the fibrillated nanocellulose was obtained with high energy ultrasonication. The commercial grade polymer matrices selected in this research were:
i. polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a water-soluble biodegradable material;
ii. poly(lactic acid) (PLA), a biodegradable polymer that comes from the fermentation of agricultural waste;
iii. poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate) (PHBH) that belongs to the family of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) and it is entirely synthesized by microorganism as an intracellular storage product under particular growth conditions.
Composite materials containing various amounts of cellulose fillers produced by solution or melt mixing were grinded and extruded through a single screw extruder to obtain filaments. With the aid of a desktop 3D printer, dumbbell specimens were fabricated, and their mechanical properties determined. Several characterization techniques were used in order to assess the effect of micro- and nanocellulose on the physical and thermo-mechanical behavior of these thermoplastic composites.
According to SEM analysis, CNC particles appear homogeneously dispersed in PVA without noticeable aggregates. Thermal degradation of PVA was shifted towards higher temperatures with the increase of filler content, enhancing the thermal stability of the composites as compared with neat PVA. An enhancement in the storage modulus with the amount of CNC was observed in both filament and 3D printed specimens. In particular, an increase of about three times in the storage modulus at room temperature was reached in 3D samples with a CNC concentration of 10wt%. An improvement of the dimensional stability was observed with a reduction of the creep compliance with the filler content. Quasi-static tensile tests evidenced an increase of the stiffness and the strength of PVA due to the CNC introduction. A comparison between the reinforcing effect of nanocellulose and microcellulose in 3D printed samples highlighted the higher efficiency of CNC over MCC in reducing the rubber-like behavior of polyvinyl alcohol.
Maleic anhydride (MAH) was employed to improve the interaction between hydrophilic microcrystalline cellulose and the PLA matrix. Infrared spectroscopy confirmed the grafting of maleic anhydride on the PLA backbone during melt mixing and SEM analysis revealed that microcellulose was well dispersed in PLA and maleic anhydride was able to enhance the interface between the two components. Thermal degradation of PLA was not affected by the presence of MAH. On the other hand, glass transition temperature, crystallization temperature and melting temperature were lowered by the increasing amount of MAH. Glass transition temperature at 10wt% of MAH decreased from 70°C to 48°C. Tensile tests highlighted that microcellulose in low concentration was able to improve the stiffness and the stress at break of 3D printed specimens. The maximum in term of stiffness and strength is reached for composite at 1wt% of MCC and at 5 wt% with the presence of MAH.
NFC was dispersed in PLA by solution mixing and nanocomposites were printed and characterized. The creep compliance curves of the 3D printed samples were well fitted by a power law model and resulted that NFC was able to reduce the time-dependent linear response under constant load conditions, improving the geometrical stability. Static tensile test on plates obtained by solution casting displayed an increase in stiffness of the filament samples with increasing amount of nanocellulose. The same effect was not observed on 3D printed samples where a poor adhesion between subsequent layers was evidenced from SEM analysis upon the introduction of NCF.
Lauryl functionalized nanocellulose was incorporated in PLA with solution mixing technique but the limited quantity of materials did not permit to go further with the production of filaments. Scanning electron microscopy indicated that up to a filler content of 6.5 wt. %, LNC was well dispersed. Nanocomposites with 3 and 5 wt. % of LNC showed the highest strain at break and a large amount of plastic deformation due to a strong interfacial adhesion between the PLA and filler particles while for higher LNC fractions the presence of aggregates weakened the nanocomposite. A decrease in stiffness was measured upon the introduction of LNC related to the low stiffness of the short aliphatic chains attached to the surface of the cellulose and so the formation of a soft phase between filler and the matrix as highlighted also by gas permeability tests.
Finally, poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate) was successfully extruded and 3D printed. PHBH and NCF were mixed in solution and extruded in form of filaments used to feed a 3D printing machine. The reinforcing effect of the nanocellulose in terms of stress at break and of elongation at break showed a maximum at a content of 0.5 wt%. An increase in stiffness for filament with increasing amount of nanocellulose was measured but also in this case it was not observed in 3D printed samples. Anyway, the presence of NCF did not affect the thermal behavior of the materials
Neural Mechanisms of Visual Mental Imagery in the Healthy and Damaged Brain
Full text linkIn the absence of visual input from the external world, humans are able to internally generate vivid mental images of external stimuli. This cognitive process is known as visual mental imagery, and it is involved in many forms of complex reasoning and problem-solving. Using functional neuroimaging, several studies revealed that visual mental imagery recruits a network of prefrontal, parietal and inferotemporal regions. Moreover, under certain conditions, imagining external entities have been shown to induce recruitment of retinotopically-organized visual areas, traditionally thought to be dedicated to the perception of external stimuli.
The recruitment of low-level visual areas following visual mental imagery of different stimuli could have important implications for the implementation of new rehabilitative techniques directed to patients suffering from visual field defects. In fact, following lesions affecting retrochiasmatic visual pathways, one of the most common deficits is homonymous hemianopia. This visual impairment is characterized by the loss of sight in one half of the visual field and has a profound impact on patients’ emotional and social wellbeing. Several studies indicated preserved visual imagery abilities in hemianopic patients, both in the sighted and damaged hemifield. This led us to hypothesize the possibility to recruit functionally preserved portions of early visual cortices in the affected hemisphere of hemianopic patients by means of visual mental imagery. If this revealed to be true, the recruitment of early visual areas would potentially induce plastic mechanisms of change that could reinstate perceptual awareness, increasing the size of the perceived visual field.
In the present thesis, we explored neural substrates of visual mental imagery both in the healthy and in the damaged brain using fMRI. In Study 1, by means of a delayed spatial judgment task, we investigated in healthy participants the degree of complexity of the information encoded in primary visual cortex, its similarities and differences with representations of perceived stimuli, and how this information is encoded in areas outside early visual cortex. We found significant encoding of complex stimulus categories in early visual areas, as well as in inferotemporal and parietal cortices. Additionally, in agreement with previous studies, we found that a subset of these regions showed a certain degree of shared representations with perception.
Moreover, in Study 2, we explored whether it is possible to selectively recruit individual quadrants within the visual field using visual mental imagery. To this aim, we tested a group of normal-sighted individuals and patients suffering from homonymous hemianopia in a visual imagery paradigm. Results indicated that normal-sighted individuals are able to recruit early visual cortex by means of top-down mechanisms. In the group of patients, we observed a large amount of interindividual variability that allowed reliable recruitment limited to the healthy hemisphere.
Together, the results of this thesis provide evidence for distinct roles of parietal and premotor areas, involved in processing the spatial layout of imagined stimuli, and temporal regions, representing the content of internally generated representations. Moreover, the results are in line with the view that, in the absence of bottom-up visual stimulation, early visual cortex is able to access information about both content and spatial layout of imagined stimuli via feedback connections. In addition, we demonstrated that the top-down modulation of low-level visual areas occurring during visual mental imagery is feasible to recruit retinotopically-organized early visual cortex, both in normal-sighted participants and in the healthy hemisphere of hemianopic patients. Albeit preliminary, these results open new perspectives on the potential use of visual mental imagery as a rehabilitation tool in the clinical treatment of visual field defects
The effect of evidential impact on perceptual probabilistic reasoning
Full text linkFor decades, works in psychology of thinking and decision making have been reporting suboptimal performance and systematic departures from the axioms of probability theory in people’s probability judgments. In these first works, poor performance was often attributed to people making normatively wrong intuitions because of their limited cognitive resources and lack of statistical skills. Over the last years, studies that considered various Bayesian models of inductive reasoning but also other high and lower-level cognitive processes provided a more optimistic picture by showing that, despite departing from the normative benchmark, people’s reasoning skills lead to adaptive and sound performance in everyday life. Different explanatory accounts for this suboptimal but sound reasoning have been proposed, some being more compelling than others. The present thesis is aimed at exploring one of these accounts that is based on confirmation relations and suggests that human inductive ability might rely more on estimating evidential impact than posterior probability. So far, this account has been applied to classical probabilistic reasoning errors, linguistic and psycholinguistic phenomena and probabilistic inferences with verbal stimuli. In this study, we tried to see whether the implicit estimation of confirmation relations can affect probability judgments also when the link between evidence and hypotheses is operationalized as the arbitrary association between visual features in briefly presented figures. First, we expected participants to consider confirmed hypotheses more probable than corresponding (in terms of posterior probability) disconfirmed ones; second, we expected them to choose the more likely option (i.e. the normatively correct one) more often when it was confirmed by the evidence provided than when it was disconfirmed. Four computer-based experiments were conducted using the same methodology. Experimental stimuli consisted of inductive arguments concerning 40 sets of figures composed of two features with two possible values each. By varying the probabilistic association between the two values of the features, sets were generated to have, for each possible combination of the two features, two arguments with the same posteriors and opposite impacts. In each trial, participants first looked at a set of figures. One of these figures was then randomly drawn. Participants were informed about the value of one feature of the drawn figure (e.g., that it was a “circle”) and had to guess the value of the other feature (“white” vs. “black”).
Throughout the four experiments, we used three different combinations of features: color and shape (exp.1: black/white; exp 2: light/dark grey), pattern and shape (exp 3) and type and orientation of line (exp 4).
In all four experiments, participants systematically chose the confirmed alternative over the equally probable, but disconfirmed one, and chose the normatively incorrect (i.e. less likely) alternative more often when it was confirmed (vs. disconfirmed) by the evidence provided. These results provided a first empirical evidence of the effect of confirmation relations on probability judgment with perceptual stimuli, but also highlighted a significant influence of the experimental material itself on choice patterns. In fact, in experiments 1 to 3 the obtained results showed that color (or pattern) was a more compelling evidence than shape in determining participants’ choices. The combination of line curvature and orientation used in experiment 4 proved to be the more balanced among those employed in the present research. Only in this last experiment, indeed, the type of evidence did not affect the choice for the confirmed alternative, nor the amount of errors. The results we found supported our experimental claims showing that confirmation relations can affect probability judgments even in absence of any semantic element, but also suggested the existence of a mutual influence between perceptual features and probability judgments. Our experimental results have theoretical as well as applied implications. On a theoretical level, they extend the results coming from works involving verbal and linguistic material to perceptual stimuli with no semantic background. Additionally, they show that high-level relations, which are completely unknown to the subject, affect the way people perceive relations within a visual set of perceptual items. This might have interesting and noteworthy implications for studies on visual cognition, and, on a broader level, contingency learning and stereotypical judgments
Linking Knowledge Bases to Social Media Profiles
No full textThe Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud is currently a primary source of background knowledge for tasks in a wide variety of domains and across many scientific fields. The structured nature and the usage of well-defined open standards make it convenient to contribute to and build upon. However, since the major part of the LOD is ultimately crowdsourced and mostly populated and updated manually, some of the content in the LOD can become stale, inconsistent and lack coverage. Social media, on the other hand, uniquely allow the real world events to be accurately reflected with little or no delay in the form of posts and profile updates. A major downside of this vibrant source of knowledge that is contained in the social media is its lack of structure, significant noisiness and restrictive APIs that make it hard to extract, analyze and use it in the downstream tasks.
In this thesis, I present the task of linking entities in a knowledge base (KB) to the corresponding social media profiles as an attempt to bridge the structured LOD cloud and the vibrant social media. As will be shown, such linking allows knowledge transfer between the two worlds: on the one hand, enabling the Semantic Web practitioners to harvest this vast amount of valuable, up-to-date data from the social media; on the other hand, the social media researchers can use the structured LOD knowledge much more efficiently, simplifying the pipelines and improving performance for tasks such as Type Prediction, Entity Linking, and User Profiling. I implement such knowledge transfer using DBpedia as a KB, since it is a cornerstone dataset in the LOD, and Twitter as a social media, due to its popularity and relative accessibility. However, approaches developed here are designed to be general and could be applied to other social media and KBs.
To this end, firstly, I introduce SocialLink - a project designed to link KBs to social media profiles. SocialLink consists of (i) a linking approach that is able to produce high-quality entity-profile pairs, (ii) a LOD-compliant dataset of alignments between DBpedia and Twitter, (iii) the Social Media Toolkit system providing additional functionality on top of SocialLink. SocialLink employs a custom deep neural network-based architecture designed to efficiently exploit many modalities of data representing entities and profiles within DBpedia and Twitter.
In second, I demonstrate how SocialLink can facilitate tasks in both Semantic Web and Social Media Analysis. In particular, I employ the abovementioned knowledge transfer to achieve state-of-the-art performance in Type Prediction task on DBpedia. Additionally, SocialLink is used to infer user interests on Twitter and to implement a novel approach that I proposed to prevent such inference. Finally, the Entity Linking capabilities of SocialLink are exploited to augment the social media management application called Pokedem and to provide an additional performance boost to a conventional Entity Linking pipeline achieving the second-best performance in EVALITA 2016 competition
Impact of ETV7 on chemoresistance and cancer stem-like cell plasticity in breast cancer
Full text linkETV7 is a poorly characterized transcriptional repressor that belongs to the large family of ETS transcription factors, whose members have been associated with several cancer-related processes. ETV7 is a well-recognized Interferon-stimulated gene (ISG), and it was shown that its expression can be synergistically induced by the combined treatment with the chemotherapeutic drug Doxorubicin and the inflammatory cytokine TNFa in different cancer cell lines, including the breast cancer-derived MCF7 cells. Recently, it has been shown that ETV7 expression is significantly increased in breast cancer tissues, compared to the normal breast; however, the roles and the impact of ETV7 expression in breast cancer have still to be elucidated. This project aimed at understanding the effects caused by increased ETV7 expression on breast cancer (BC) progression and resistance to conventional anti-cancer drugs.
We first observed that ETV7 expression can be induced by different stimuli, particularly by the treatment with several chemotherapeutic drugs able to induce DNA damage. We also demonstrated that the expression of ETV7 could affect the sensitivity of BC cell lines to standard anti-cancer therapies, such as Doxorubicin, 5-Fluorouracil and radiotherapy, and this evidence was correlated with an increase in ABC transporters and anti-apoptotic proteins expression. By investigating the possible mechanism responsible for ETV7-dependent Doxorubicin resistance we identified a novel target gene of ETV7, DNAJC15, which is a co-chaperone protein whose repression was previously associated with drug resistance.
Given the ability of cancer stem cells (CSCs) to be more chemoresistant, we analyzed the effects of ETV7 expression on the sub-population of breast CSCs. We found that ETV7 expression could exert a strong effect on breast cancer cells stemness, confirmed by both an increase in CD44+/CD24low population and mammosphere formation efficiency. In order to investigate the mechanisms responsible for these effects, we performed an RNA-seq analysis, which revealed significant repression of a signature of Interferon-stimulated genes, suggesting a possible negative feedback mechanism in the regulation of the response to Interferon. Finally, prolonged treatment of breast cancer cells with IFNb was able to rescue the effects on CSCs content.
Taken collectively, our data revealed that ETV7 can affect the sensitivity of breast cancer cells to some chemotherapeutic drugs and we propose ETV7 as an important contributor to the tumor-initiating capabilities of BC cells
Novel Methods for Change Detection in Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images
Full text linkThe scope of this dissertation is to present and discuss novel paradigms and techniques for the extraction of information from long time series of remotely sensed images.
Many images are acquired everyday at high spatial and temporal resolution. The unprecedented availability of images is increasing due to the number of acquiring sensors. Nowadays, many satellites have been launched in orbit around our planet and more launches are planned in the future. Notable examples of currently operating remote sensing missions are the Landsat and Sentinel programs run by space agencies. This trend is speeding up every year with the launch of many other commercial satellites. Initiatives like cubesats propose a new paradigm to continuously monitor Earth’s surface. The larger availability of remotely sensed data does not only involve space-borne platforms. In the recent years, new platforms, such as airborne unmanned vehicles, gained popularity also thanks to the reduction of costs of these instruments. Overall, all these phenomena are fueling the so-called Big Data revolution in remote sensing. The unprecedented number of images enables a large number of applications related to the monitoring of the environment on a global and regional scale. A non-exhaustive list of applications contains climate change assessment, disaster monitoring and urban planning.
In this thesis, novel paradigms and techniques are proposed for the automatic exploitation of the information acquired by the growing number of remote sensing data sources, either multispectral or Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors. There is a need of new processing strategies being able to reliably and automatically extract information from the ever growing amount of images. In this context, this thesis focuses on Change Detection (CD) techniques capable of identifying areas within remote sensing images where the land-cover/land-use changed. Indeed, CD is one of the first steps needed to understand Earth’s surface dynamics and its evolution. Images from such long and dense time series have redundant information. So, the information extracted from one image or a single image pair in the time series is correlated to other images or image pairs. This thesis explores mechanisms to exploit the temporal correlation within long image time series for an improved information extraction. This concept is general and can be applied to any information extraction process.
The thesis provides three main novel contributions to the state of the art.
The first contribution consists in a novel framework for CD in image time series. The binary change variable is modeled as a conservative field. Then, it is used to improve the bi-temporal CD map computed between a target pair of images extracted from a time series. This framework takes advantage of the correlation of changes detected between pairs of images extracted from long time series.
The second contribution presents an iterative approach that aims at improving the global CD performance for any possible pair of images defined within a time series. The results obtained by any bi-temporal technique, either binary or multiclass, are automatically validated against each other. By means of an iterative mechanism, the consistency of changes is tested and enforced for any pair of images.
The third contribution consists in the detection of clouds in long time series of multispectral images and in the restoration of pixels covered by clouds. The presence of clouds may strongly affect the automatic analysis of images and the performance of change detection techniques (or other processes for the extraction of information). In this contribution, the temporal information of long optical image time series is exploited to improve the identification of pixels covered by clouds and their restoration with respect to standard monotemporal approaches.
The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is proved on experiments on synthetic and real multispectral and SAR images. Experimental results are accompanied by comprehensive qualitative and quantitative analysis
A Service Robot for Navigation Assistance and Physical Rehabilitation of Seniors
Full text linkThe population of the advanced countries is ageing, with the direct consequence that an increasing number of people will have to live with sensitive, cognitive and physical disabilities. People with impaired physical ability are not confident to move alone, especially in crowded environment and for long journeys, highly reducing the quality of their life. We propose a new generation of robotic walking assistants whose mechanical and electronic components are conceived to optimize the collaboration between the robot and its users. We will apply these general ideas to investigate the interaction between older adults and a robotic walker, named FriWalk, exploiting it either as a navigational or as a rehabilitation aid.
For the use of the FriWalk as a navigation assistance, the system guides the user securing high levels of safety, a perfect compliance with the social rules and non-intrusive interaction between human and machine. To this purpose, we developed several guidance systems ranging from completely passive strategies to active solutions exploiting either the rear or the front motors mounted on the robot. The common strategy at the basis of all the algorithms is that the responsibility of the locomotion belongs always to the user, both to increase the mobility of elder users and to enhance their perception of control over the robot. This way the robot intervenes only whenever it is strictly necessary not to mitigate the user safety. Moreover, the robotic walker has been endowed with a tablet and graphical user interface (GUI) which provides the user with the visual indications about the path to follow. Since the FriWalk was developed to suit the needs of users with different deficits, we conducted extensive human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments with elders, complemented with direct interviews of the participants. As concerns the use of the FriWalk as a rehabilitation aid, force sensing to estimate the torques applied by the user and change the user perceived inertia can be exploited by doctors to let the user feel the device heavier or lighter. Moreover, thanks to a new generation of sensors, the device can be exploited in a clinical context to track the performance of the users' rehabilitation exercises, in order to assist nurses and doctors during the hospitalization of older adults