There is an urgent need to develop sustainable and impactful interventions to mitigate the high risk of diet-related non-communicable diseases (diet-NCDs) in South Asians living in high-income countries. The current study using a co-design methodology aimed to identify community-led intervention components (solutions) to address barriers and enablers of disease-promoting dietary and physical activity behaviours in New Zealand South Asians. Data were collected from South Asian immigrants aged 25–59 years via three focus group discussions (n = 21) and 10 telephone or face-to-face interviews between 2018 and 2019. The thematic analysis resulted in identifying 22 barrier and enabler codes and 12 solution codes which were summarised under five themes. The key solutions (intervention components) to mitigate the identified target behaviours were providing recipes for using local vegetables in South Asian cuisine, information on the nutritional quality of frozen vegetables and canned lentils, simple home gardening techniques, the saturated fat content of dairy foods, interpreting nutrition labels, optimal portion sizes of foods, and framing low-fat messages positively. Similarly, group-based activities with peer support such as walking, cultural dancing and community sports like cricket, football, and tennis were the identified solutions to increase physical activity levels. The identified solutions for health promoting dietary habits and physical activity levels could be part of any targeted multicomponent health promoting programme to reduce the risk of diet-NCDs in South Asian immigrants.

This work presents a systematic design selection methodology that utilizes a co-design strategy for system-level optimization of compliantly actuated robots that are known for their advantages over robotic systems driven by rigid actuators. The introduced methodology facilitates a decision-making strategy that is instrumental in making selections among system-optimal robot designs actuated by various degrees of variable or fixed compliance. While the simultaneous co-design method that is utilized throughout guarantees systems performing at their full potential, a homotopy technique is used to maintain integrity via generation of a continuum of robot designs actuated with varying degrees of variable and fixed compliance. Fairness of the selection methodology is ensured via utilization of common underlying (variable) compliant actuation principle and dynamical task requirements throughout the generated system designs. The direct consequence of the developed methodology is that it allows robot designers make informed selections among a variety of systems which are guaranteed to perform at their best. Applicability of the introduced methodology has been validated using a case study for system-optimal design of an active knee prosthesis that is driven by a mechanically adjustable compliance and controllable equilibrium position actuator (MACCEPA) under a periodic/real-life dynamical task.