RCAAP Repository

This paper gives an overview of home automation technologies, specially, those disseminated in Europe.

This paper’s main objectives are to describe the environment surrounding Online Healthcare, as a potential means of providing health information and advice, and also to spread the major certification initiatives presently in course. Finally, and using the knowledge acquired with those initiatives, we proceed to the selection of key-criteria in the field of Online Healthcare Information and Advice.

This paper intends to contribute to development of a methodology that facilitates the introduction of information and communication technologies in the Particular Institutions of Social Solidarity, in order to support teamwork. The methodology proposed, the Best Institution Pratice, has as intention to analyse the inherent processes of the activities of the Particular Institutions of Social Solidarity to incorporate good practices for the essential areas of those institutions.

This work presents an iterative algorithm for blind source separation. The algorithm is based on the generalized eigendecomposition of a matrix pencil. A Matlab package of software was developed to evaluate the algorithm performance. Some experimental results, using artificially mixed audio signals and a matrix pencil computed at the input and at the output of a linear finite impulse response, are also presented.

As bolhas pulmonares com conteúdo aéreo podem ocorrer na sequência de enfisemas ou outras patologias, reduzindo a oxigenação sanguínea e, em caso de ruptura, podendo colocar ar na cavidade sub-pleural. Para realizar um diagnóstico médico e consequente tratamento, é necessário localizar e caracterizar morfologicamente as bolhas pulmonares. Neste artigo, descrevemos um método de localização, representação e quantificação das bolhas pulmonares, baseado nos níveis de Hounsfield da região pulmonar que contém as bolhas, nas características físicas das bolhas e ainda sua na coerência axial ao longo do exame TAC.

Neste artigo apresenta-se o ABC – Arquivo Bibliográfico para Publicações Científicas. É feita uma descrição genérica dos motivos que levaram à sua implementação, das vantagens da sua utilização e a quem se destina. Nos tópicos seguintes é feita uma descrição das funcionalidades que o sistema dispõe e de como utilizar essas funcionalidades. Por fim faz-se um ponto de situação da utilização do sistema pela Universidade de Aveiro usada como «cobaia», para aperfeiçoamento de mecanismos que tornem possível a adaptabilidade e flexibilidade do sistema à dinâmica da comunidade científica.

Evolutionary algorithms (EA) have been shown to be an effective approach for finding near-optimum solutions to problems of combinatorial optimization. The paper analyzes a possibility of acceleration of EA for the traveling salesman problem (TSP) with the aid of reconfigurable hardware. The estimative results show that the combination of general-purpose computer and FPGAresources allows performance to be increased significantly.

In this paper, we present four types of closed loop symbol synchronizers, namely the analog, the hybrid, the combinational and the sequential. In the phase synchronizers the difference between the varioustypes was inside the phase comparator, with a similar mode inthe symbol synchronizers this difference is inside the signalcomparator. Our main objective is to study the jitter behavior, of the various synchronizers, in the noise presence and then to establish some comparisons.

In this contribution we compare the thermal tuning capabilities of two type I gratings, considering an unloaded and a hydrogen-loaded fiber, and a type IIa grating. We further study their responses stability with temperature, analyzing their potential as optical filters in wavelength division multiplexing systems. We conclude that all of them have similar tuning efficiencies, however, as the temperature is changed, the type I grating written in the unloaded fiber presents much higher variations on its reflectivity, bandwidth and group delay than the other two cases, misadvising its utilization as thermo-tunable optical filter for wavelength-multiplexed systems. The best tuning range/filter response variation balance is achieved for type IIa gratings.

This paper describes the robotic agent Hamster witch participated in the Ciber-Rato contest of the Festival Nacional de Robótica 2002. This robot uses a very simple algorithm which is efficient.

This article describes the implementation of a virtual robot with a smooth reactive behavior. This robot, socalled R_ZERO, was submitted to the tests of the Ciber-Rato 2002 contest at the Aveiro University; where it obtained the 3rd place of the competition.

This article has a brief description of the internal functioning of the virtual robot YAM (Yet Another Mouse), which won the 2002 edition of the “Ciber-Rato” contest. The robot is caracterized by having a strong component of long term planning, since it uses the info given by the beacon sensor to discover the global position of the exit of the maze. In that way it can search the best path to the exit having inaccount the visited zones, avoiding paths that are locally “good”, but globally “bad”.

Methods: The hamartomas of 7 patients with HH and epilepsy (ages 2-25) were classified as to lateralization and connection to the antero-posterior axis of the hypothalamus in high resolution brain magnetic ressonances. We correlated the anatomic classification with the clinical and neurophysiological manifestations of the epilepsy as evaluated in long-term (1-3 days) video-EEG recordings, including ictal documentation. Results: The hamartomas ranged in size from 0.4 to 2.8 cubic centimeters, with complete lateralization of the connection to hypothalamus in 6/7 of patients. Ictal clinical manifestations showed good correlation with the lobar involvement suggested by the ictal/inter ictal EEG. These manifestations suggest the existence of two types of neocortical involvement, one associated with temporal lobe, associated with hamartomas connected to the posterior hypothalamus, and another associated with the frontal lobe, seen in lesions connecting to the middle portions of the hypothalamus. Consideration of the known anatomy of the hypothalamic-neocortical projection pathways leads us to suggest propagation of the epileptic activity to the temporal lobes through the Fornix and to the frontal lobes through the Medial Longitudinal Fasciculus. Conclusions: The unilateral connection to the hypothalamus in most hamartomas along with the propagation of paroxysmal activity to the neocortex through specific anatomic pathways suggests the possibility of performing distal disconnection procedures as a palliative surgical procedure in high risc patients for removal of the hamartoma.  

One of the most important and difficult tasks in Epileptology is the localisation of the epileptogenic areas/focus. This is fundamental to achieve good clinical classification and consequent good pharmacological treatment. If needed, it allows adequate surgical procedure consequently decreasing the number of resistant cases and improving patient’s quality of life. In this work we propose a solution with the objective ofimproving the accuracy of epileptogenic event origin location taking into account several types of information (clinical, scalp EEG, SPECT, CT and MRI) that are integrated in a multimedia environment available in the clinical context of epilepsy surgery candidates evaluation.

Hippocampal sclerosis (HS) is a common lesion encountered in patients with temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE).Studies with quantitative magnetic resonance (MRI) and chemical-shift imaging (CSI) have found wide spread structural and metabolic changes along the entire length of the hippocampus. The aim of this study was to investigate diffusion changes interictally in patients with chronic TLE carrying structural/metabolic pathological changes in the hippocampus and to test the hypothesis that HS would be associated with abnormalities of diffusion.

This article defines the concepts related with the use of technological solutions to support people with disabilities. In particular, it tries to systematize the technical aids that make possible the access to computing systems and, therefore, to the information society.

This paper describes the results obtained in the characterisation, optimisation and test, of two wirelessinfrared communication systems. Although both systems arebased on the same technology they are used on differentapplications. On the first part of this paper an wireless optical indoorcommunication system, that uses angle diversity techniqueson the reception is presented. This optical receiver wasdeveloped in the IRWLAN project. Some practical results ofthis receiver, such as SNR measurements, BER, range andsensitivity to ambient light noise are presented. On the second part of this paper, a test and measurementsetup for the characterisation of a line-of-sight, point-topoint,outdoor optical system and its transmission channel are presented.

The faithful transmission of information at distance is a Man’s primitive dream. Although we notice a great evolution it is still possible to introduce improvements. The transmitted signal suffers attenuation and distortion, thenit is necessary that periodically a regenerator replaces the lostenergy (amplifier with AGC) and retimes the signal with theminimum bit error rate (synchronizer with AFC).

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Pulmonary contours in chest CT images are closed curves that may, in some cases, exhibit multiple concave and convex irregularities. In this paper we assess the quality of pulmonary contours obtained by several fully automated methods. A comparison among these contours and corresponding manually drawn reference contours was performed and several figures of merit were assigned to each one of the automated contours extraction algorithms. Likeness between a computed contour and reference contour was measured through the Pratt figure of merit, similarity index, mean error and fraction of errors greater than 5pixels. For each of these figures we present an exploratory statistical analysis and discuss its sensibility to the longitudinal location of the CT slice.