The eight papers in this special section focus on serious game computer applications for the health care field. During this period, we witnessed the creation of several conferences, providing a forum to discuss and share knowledge, experiences, and scientific and technical results, related to state-of-the-art solutions and technologies on serious games and applications for health and healthcare. The growth of computational capacity, development of new forms of interaction with the user (patient), and theoretical foundations produced by the scientific community over the past few years have now made it possible and viable to develop solutions, based on serious games, to face real problems. The possibility to create scenarios for medical training and simulation, the use of video games in rehabilitation procedures in an extra hospital environment, and the engagement provided by forms of teaching based on video games are just some examples of how this technology can be used. This special issue aims to highlight some of the high-quality research produced in the field of serious games applied to health.

This paper describes the UX-1 underwater mine exploration robotic system under development in the context of the UNEXMIN project. UNEXMIN is an international innovation action funded under the EU H2020 program, aiming to develop new technologies and services allowing the exploration of flooded underground mines. The system is comprised by the UX-1 robot prototype, launch and recovery system, command and control subsystem and a data management and post-processing computational infrastructure. The UX-1 robot is a small spherical robot equipped with a multibeam sonar, five digital cameras and rotating laser line structured light systems. It is capable of obtaining an accurate point cloud of the surrounding environment along with high resolution imagery. A set of mineralogy, water parameters and geophysical sensors was also developed in order to obtain a more comprehensive mine model. These comprise a multi-spectral camera, electro-conductivity, pH, magnetic field sensors, a subbottom sonar, total natural gamma-ray detector, UV-light for fluorescent observation and a water sampling unit. The design of the system is presented along with the robot design. Some preliminary results are also presented and discussed.

Observability is mandatory for debugging purposes in all microelectronic systems. Mixed signal cores, in particular, require high observability in order to allow post production debug and to drive the design enhancements towards the real non-ideal behaviour monitored in individual modules. Controllability is also a major advantage in the design-for-debug process. This work presents a low cost controllability and observability methodology that is evaluated in terms of area cost and bandwidth capability for different operating conditions. The proposed methodology is used to add debugging capability to a DCDC, a charge pump, a LDO and a bandgap of a power management unit.

This work presents a hybrid coordinated manoeuvre for docking an autonomous surface vehicle with an autonomous underwater vehicle. The control manoeuvre uses visual information to estimate the AUV relative position and attitude in relation to the ASV and steers the ASV in order to dock with the AUV. The AUV is assumed to be at surface with only a small fraction of its volume visible. The system implemented in the autonomous surface vehicle ROAZ, developed by LSA-ISEP to perform missions in river environment, test autonomous AUV docking capabilities and multiple AUV/ASV coordinated missions is presented. Information from a low cost embedded robotics vision system (LSAVision), along with inertial navigation sensors is fused in an extended Kalman filter and used to determine AUV relative position and orientation to the surface vehicle The real time vision processing system is described and results are presented in operational scenario.