In this Special Issue on human health engineering, we invited submissions exploring recent contributions to the field of human health engineering, which is the technology used for monitoring the physical or mental health status of individuals in a variety of applications. Contributions focused on sensors, wearable hardware, algorithms, or integrated monitoring systems. We organized the different papers according to their contributions to the main aspects of the monitoring and control engineering scheme applied to human health applications, including papers focusing on measuring/sensing physiological variables, contributions describing research on the modelling of biological signals, papers highlighting health monitoring applications, and finally examples of control applications for human health. In comparison to biomedical engineering, the field of human health engineering also covers applications on healthy humans (e.g., sports, sleep, and stress) and thus not only contributes to develop technology for curing patients or supporting chronically ill people, but also more generally for disease prevention and optimizing human well-being.

Data mining has evolved from methods of simple statistical analysis to complex pattern recognition in the past decades. During the progression, the data mining algorithms are modified or extended in order to overcome some specific problems. This chapter discusses about the prospects of improving data mining algorithms by integrating bio-inspired optimization, which has lately captivated much of researchers’ attention. In particular, high dimensionality and the unavailability of the whole data set (as in stream mining) in the training data have known to be two major challenges. We demonstrated that these two challenges, through two small examples such as K-means clustering and time-series classification, can be overcome by integrating data mining and bio-inspired algorithms.

The two volume set LNAI 7101 and 7102 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Applications, ICIRA 2011, held in Aachen, Germany, in November 2011. The 122 revised full papers presented were thoroughly reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They are organized in topical sections on progress in indoor UAV, robotics intelligence, industrial robots, rehabilitation robotics, mechanisms and their applications, multi robot systems, robot mechanism and design, parallel kinematics, parallel kinematics machines and parallel robotics, handling and manipulation, tangibility in human-machine interaction, navigation and localization of mobile robot, a body for the brain: embodied intelligence in bio-inspired robotics, intelligent visual systems, self-optimising production systems, computational intelligence, robot control systems, human-robot interaction, manipulators and applications, stability, dynamics and interpolation, evolutionary robotics, bio-inspired robotics, and image-processing applications.