El rol del paciente experto en el tratamiento de las adicciones: una propuesta para paliar las altas tasas de abandono prematuro en comunidades terapéuticas

Curs 2012-2013El objetivo de este estudio recae en cómo y de qué forma el ex adicto a sustancias alteradoras del ánimo (E-ASAA), cursando por el estadio de mantenimiento, puede ejercer el rol de asesor y promotor de salud, como “Paciente Experto”, conjuntamente con los profesionales especializados en drogodependencias. Paralelamente este “cómo y de qué forma” viene a dar respuesta a una necesidad existente en las Comunidades Terapéuticas, a saber, reducir las Altas Voluntarias (AV) de los residentes recién incorporados y tras su Alta Terapéutica (AT). Sin embargo, se requiere de una investigación de tipo cualitativo para determinar los factores desencadenantes que inducen a esta prevalencia de AV y recaídas post-AT. Los resultados extraídos de la investigación a informantes clave muestran como existe un deficitario asesoramiento pre-entrada y acompañamiento post-AT. El E-ASAA, debidamente formado, podría dar respuesta a estas demandas asistenciales, mejorando así la completa reinserción de los usuarios de CCTT. La Propuesta del Proyecto “Mi amigo de Comunidad” integra este conocimiento aportando soluciones.The main purpose of this project is to analyze how the former addict of mood-altering substances can take the role of adviser and health promoter, acting as “expert patient”, together with the specialized professionals in drug addictions. In parallel this “how” covers an existing need in the therapy communities, as reduces the voluntary discharges (VD) of the new residents and just after their therapeutic discharge (TD). Nevertheless, a qualitative investigation needs to be performed in order to determine the factors that triggered the prevalence of VD and the post-TD relapses. The results extracted from this investigation to key-informers show how a poor pre-entrance advice and post-TD companion exist. The E-ASSA properly formed could cover these existential demands, improving the proper re-insertion of the CCTT users. The project proposal “My community friend” handles this knowledge and provides solutions

Comparing and modeling land use organization in cities

The advent of geolocated ICT technologies opens the possibility of exploring how people use space in cities, bringing an important new tool for urban scientists and planners, especially for regions where data is scarce or not available. Here we apply a functional network approach to determine land use patterns from mobile phone records. The versatility of the method allows us to run a systematic comparison between Spanish cities of various sizes. The method detects four major land use types that correspond to different temporal patterns. The proportion of these types, their spatial organization and scaling show a strong similarity between all cities that breaks down at a very local scale, where land use mixing is specific to each urban area. Finally, we introduce a model inspired by Schelling's segregation, able to explain and reproduce these results with simple interaction rules between different land uses.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures + Supplementary informatio

Exploring the impact of the recombinant Escherichia coli strain on defensins antimicrobial activity: BL21 versus Origami strain

The growing emergence of microorganisms resistant to antibiotics has prompted the development of alternative antimicrobial therapies. Among them, the antimicrobial peptides produced by innate immunity, which are also known as host defense peptides (HDPs), hold great potential. They have been shown to exert activity against both Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria, including those resistant to antibiotics. These HDPs are classified into three categories: defensins, cathelicidins, and histatins. Traditionally, HDPs have been chemically synthesized, but this strategy often limits their application due to the high associated production costs. Alternatively, some HDPs have been recombinantly produced, but little is known about the impact of the bacterial strain in the recombinant product. This work aimed to assess the influence of the Escherichia coli strain used as cell factory to determine the activity and stability of recombinant defensins, which have 3 disulfide bonds. For that, an α-defensin [human α-defensin 5 (HD5)] and a β-defensin [bovine lingual antimicrobial peptide (LAP)] were produced in two recombinant backgrounds. The first one was an E. coli BL21 strain, which has a reducing cytoplasm, whereas the second was an E. coli Origami B, that is a strain with a more oxidizing cytoplasm. The results showed that both HD5 and LAP, fused to Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), were successfully produced in both BL21 and Origami B strains. However, differences were observed in the HDP production yield and bactericidal activity, especially for the HD5-based protein. The HD5 protein fused to GFP was not only produced at higher yields in the E. coli BL21 strain, but it also showed a higher quality and stability than that produced in the Origami B strain. Hence, this data showed that the strain had a clear impact on both HDPs quantity and quality.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Computing Image Descriptors from Annotations Acquired from External Tools

Visual descriptors are widely used in several recognition and classification tasks in robotics. The main challenge for these tasks is to find a descriptor that could represent the image content without losing representative information of the image. Nowadays, there exists a wide range of visual descriptors computed with computer vision techniques and different pooling strategies. This paper proposes a novel way for building image descriptors using an external tool, namely: Clarifai. This is a remote web tool that allows to automatically describe an input image using semantic tags, and these tags are used to generate our descriptor. The descriptor generation procedure has been tested in the ViDRILO dataset, where it has been compared and merged with some well-known descriptors. Moreover, subset variable selection techniques have been evaluated. The experimental results show that our descriptor is competitive in classification tasks with the results obtained with other kind of descriptors.Visual descriptors are widely used in several recognition and classification tasks in robotics. The main challenge for these tasks is to find a descriptor that could represent the image content without losing representative information of the image. Nowadays, there exists a wide range of visual descriptors computed with computer vision techniques and different pooling strategies. This paper proposes a novel way for building image descriptors using an external tool, namely: Clarifai. This is a remote web tool that allows to automatically describe an input image using semantic tags, and these tags are used to generate our descriptor. The descriptor generation procedure has been tested in the ViDRILO dataset, where it has been compared and merged with some well-known descriptors. Moreover, subset variable selection techniques have been evaluated. The experimental results show that our descriptor is competitive in classification tasks with the results obtained with other kind of descriptors

The Nowcasting SAF (NWC SAF): examples of operational use of its geostationary products in nowcasting tasks

Presentación realizada en la 2nd European Nowcasting Conference, celebrada en Deutches Wetterdienst, Offenbach (Alemania) del 3 al 5 de mayo de 2017

Nowcasting SAF products and applications

Presentación realizada en: Using ECMWF's Forecasts (UEF2017), celebrada del 12 al 16 de junio de 2017 en Reading (Inglaterra)

Failure of ProTaper rotary Ni-Ti instruments used by undergraduate students

Objective: To evaluate the effect of number of uses, angle and radius of curvature and type of instrument on the fracture of ProTaper rotary instruments when used by undergraduate students. Study design: Three hundred and seventy-six molars, with a total of 1114 root canals, extracted were instrumented by undergraduate students using ProTaper instruments according to the manufacturer´s recommendations. When fracture occurred, data were collected concerning the number of uses, type of instrument, level of fracture, angle and radius of curvature. ANOVA test were used to determine the influence of type of instrument in the incidence of instrument fracture. Logistic regression model was used to determine the influence of number of uses, angle and radius of curvature in the incidence of instrument fracture. Significance was set at p< 0.05. Results: A total of 37 Ni-Ti rotary instruments fractured during the treatment. Fracture occurred in 9.84% (37/376) of the teeth treated and 3.32% of the canals prepared with Ni-Ti rotary instruments (37/1114). A decrease in the radius of curvature of the canal significantly increased the likelihood of fracture (p=0.0001). Instrument fracture significantly increased as the number of uses increased (p=0.0037). No significant differences were found between the 6 types of ProTaper instruments (p=0.8). A reduction in the angle of curvature did not produce a significant decrease in the incidence of instrument separation (p=0.08). Conclusions: The results of this study imply that instrument fracture is linked to radius of curvature and number of uses

Edge computing and communication for energy-efficient earth surveillance with LEO satellites

Modern satellites deployed in low Earth orbit (LEO) accommodate processing payloads that can be exploited for edge computing. Furthermore, by implementing inter-satellite links, the LEO satellites in a constellation can route the data end-toend (E2E). These capabilities can be exploited to greatly improve the current store-and-forward approaches in Earth surveillance systems. However, they give rise to an NP-hard problem of joint communication and edge computing resource management (RM). In this paper, we propose an algorithm that allows the satellites to select between computing the tasks at the edge or at a cloud server and to allocate an adequate power for communication. The overall objective is to minimize the energy consumption at the satellites while fulfilling specific service E2E latency constraints for the computing tasks. Experimental results show that our algorithm achieves energy savings of up to 18% when compared to the selected benchmarks with either 1) fixed edge computing decisions or 2) maximum power allocation.Part of the research has been supported by the project SatNEx-V, co-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). This work has also received funding by the Spanish ministry of science and innovation under project IRENE (PID2020-115323RB-C31 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033) and grant from the Spanish ministry of economic affairs and digital transformation and of the European union – NextGenerationEU [UNICO-5G I+D/AROMA3D-Space (TSI-063000-2021-70).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft