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Assistive technologies for children with cognitive and/or motor disabilities: a diagnosis of the training needs of informal caregivers
Publication . Almeida, I.; Ribeiro, Jaime; Moreira, A.
Assistive technologies promote communication, personal independence as well as the inclusion of children with cognitive or motor disabilities. Despite the human and material resources available, the implementation of assistive technologies in many family settings is still a struggling task. With the present study we seek to survey information and training needs of informal caregivers related to the use ofassistive technologies at home, so as to, in the near future, try to meet them. Therefore, we are conducting a focus group on that topic with therapists, special education teachers and an educational psychologist and analyzing the content of the discussion. The data gives a perspective on (i) how thorough informal caregivers' knowledge of what assistive technologies and their advantages are, (ii) difficulties reported by informal caregivers when using them with their children, (iii) reasons that may lead them to the abandonment of assistive technology devices, (iv) how they can develop their skills and use the technology more effectively and (v) how information on assistive technologies can be made available to them. Therefore, the full aim of this research is to contribute to reducing technology abandonment and to enhancing its use in the family setting by children with cognitive and/or motor limitations. Some preliminary results are put forward.
Efficient source finding for radio interferometric images
Publication . Lucas, L.; Staley, T.; Scaife, A.
Object detection in astronomical images, generically referred to as source finding, is often performed before the object characterisation stage in astrophysical processing work flows. In radio astronomy, source finding has historically been performed by bespoke off-line systems; however, modern data acquisition systems as well as those proposed for upcoming observatories such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will make this approach unfeasible. One area where a change of approach is particularly necessary is in the design of fast imaging systems for transient studies. This paper presents a number of advances in accelerating and automating the source finding in such systems.
Reliability of AAL Systems Modeled as BPMN Business Processes
Publication . Respício, Ana; Martinho, Ricardo; Domingos, Dulce
The use of Ambient-Assisted Living (AAL) systems has been spreading across several countries, with the ultimate purpose of improving the quality of life of patients. These systems often reflect complex architectures including several components such as sensors, gateways, Information Systems or even actuators, as well as messaging and transmitting protocols. Failures in these systems can have severe impact on a monitored patient, and most components foresee some kind of compensation countermeasures to increase reliability.
Nevertheless, these measures are often self-contained to a single component and
do not address the overall AAL system reliability, disregarding precedent and
successor activities and interactions that exist for each time a certain value is
registered or a certain alert is triggered. In this paper, we propose a new approach
to calculate the overall reliability of an AAL system. We take a Business Process Management (BPM) approach to model the activities and interactions between AAL components, using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. By extending the BPMN standard to include reliability information, we can derive the overall reliability of a certain AAL system. To prove this approach, we also present a reliability study considering scenarios with single and pairwise reliability variations of AAL system components. With this approach, healthcare managers can benefit from important overall reliability information of an AAL system, and better allocate the appropriate resources (including hardware or health care professionals) to improve responsiveness of care to patients.
Computational complexity control for HEVC based on coding tree spatio-temporal correlation
Publication . Correa, Guilherme; Assunção, Pedro; Cruz, Luis A. da Silva; Agostini, Luciano
The High Efficiency Video Coding standard shows improved compression efficiency in comparison to previous standards at the cost of higher computational complexity. In this paper, a complexity control method for HEVC encoders based on the dynamic adjustment of the number of constrained coding treeblocks is proposed. The method limits the maximum tree depth used in the coding structures based on spatio-temporal correlation in order to decrease the number of evaluations performed in the Rate-Distortion Optimization process. Experimental results show that the proposed method is capable of maintaining the encoding time per frame under a pre-defined target, reaching computational complexity decreases of up to 50% at the cost of an average BD-PSNR loss of 0.26 dB in the worst case scenario.
Production of thermoplastics matrix preimpregnated materials to manufacture composite pultruded profiles
Publication . Novo, P.J.; Nunes, J.P.; Silva, J.F.; Tinoco, V.; Marques, A.T.
The aim of this work is to optimize the production of new continuous carbon fibers reinforced polypropylene matrix pre-impregnated materials (towpregs) continuously processed by dry deposition of polypropylene (PP) powder by our own developed dry coating line. The processing of the produced towpregs by pultrusion, using a prototype equipment, was also optimized. The optimization of both processes was made by studying the influence of the most relevant processing parameters in the final properties of the produced towpregs and composites. The method of Taguchi/DOE (Design of Experiments) was used to allow the determination of the optimal processing windows. The possibility of using maleic anhydride as compatibilizer for polypropylene reinforced carbon fiber composites (CF/PP) was also analyzed. A pre-consolidate tape was produced by the melting cross-head extrusion process and its proprieties compared with those of towpregs. Finally, towpregs were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and visual analysis. Their polymer mass contents were determined and the final pultruded composite profiles were also submitted to tensile, interlaminar, flexural, calcination and optical microscopy tests.