Classification techniques on computerized systems to predict and/or to detect Apnea: A systematic review

Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS), which can significantly decrease the quality of life is associated with a major risk factor of health implications such as increased cardiovascular disease, sudden death, depression, irritability, hypertension, and learning difficulties. Thus, it is relevant and timely to present a systematic review describing significant applications in the framework of computational intelligence-based SAS, including its performance, beneficial and challenging effects, and modeling for the decision-making on multiple scenarios.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The rise of the line manager : the association between human resources management and organizational performance

Doutoramento em GestãoHuman resources (HR) policies are an important component of HR systems, as they influence employees’ behaviours and attitudes, which, in turn, generate positive effects on performance. This research contributes to the study of HR policies and its association with organisational performance (OP), by: i) presenting a literature review, which highlights the points of agreement and limitations in the literature; ii) exploring the influence of intermediate variables in this association, and; iii) emphasising the importance of employees’ perceptions and line managers’ empowerment on the said relationships. To achieve these objectives, four studies were carried out, each of which is described in a full chapter. The first chapter reviews the literature and offers some insights up until the advanced theory on the HR-performance linkage. In addition, it examines the literature and establishes the basis for the remaining chapters. The second chapter studies the impact of HR policies on OP. It highlights the potential influence of employees’ outcomes by exploring some of the intermediating variables, namely employees’ attitudes and behaviours. The third chapter addresses employees’ perception regarding HR policies and the link to OP. It offers new insights on how employees perceive policies and how these perceptions are likely to boost performance. The objective of the last chapter is to understand the meaningfulness of line manager influence. The results suggest that HR policies should be employed by line managers to actively manage the HR process in support of managerial actions and to control employee’s outcomes. In summary, this research highlights the fact that it is not enough to just have a set of HR policies in place, but that it is also important to take an interest in how these policies are implemented and perceived. Employees’ perceptions regarding the reasons why management adopts certain HR policies has a consequence for employee attitudes behaviour-unit performance.As políticas de recursos humanos (RH) têm um papel importante no sistema de RH, contribuindo com efeitos positivos no desempenho influenciando comportamentos e atitudes dos colaboradores. Este trabalho tem como objetivo contribuir para o estudo da associação RH desempenho organizacional (DO), nomeadamente: i) apresentar uma revisão da literatura, destacando pontos de concordância e limitações; ii) explorar o efeito das variáveis mediadoras; iii) destacar a influência dos chefes de serviço (chefes) na construção das perceções dos colaboradores; e iv) examinar a interação chefe-subordinado. A investigação é constituída por quatro estudos. O primeiro estudo, revê a literatura sobre a relação RH-DO e desenvolve a sua ligação com base na teoria. Este capítulo leva o leitor a conhecer os princípios do tema e revela a sua visão sobre o futuro do tema. O segundo estudo analisa o impacto que as políticas de RH têm no DO. Os resultados suportam um modelo, em que a associação é mediada, ou seja, de forma indireta. O terceiro estudo contribui para preencher a lacuna na literatura sobre a perceção dos colaboradores. Apresenta novos “insights” sobre como os colaboradores percebem as políticas e como suas perceções podem impulsionar o DO. O último estudo tem como objetivo compreender a relevância do chefe. Nomeadamente, na gestão das expectativas e perceções dos seus subordinados. Os resultados da investigação, sugerem que as políticas de RH são utilizadas, pelos chefes, como “ferramentas”, permitindo controlar os resultados desejados. Os chefes são responsáveis pelas interações com os seus subordinados, tendo as suas ações impacto na prestação dos subordinados. Concluindo, a investigação demonstra que a mera existência de políticas de RH é insuficiente; Logo, tanto o processo, como a sua aplicação, tal como, antecipar o impacto que provocam nos colaboradores são fundamentais. Com esta investigação pretendemos clarificar a associação entre gestão de RH e o DOinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Information technologies for pain management

Millions of people around the world suffer from pain, acute or chronic and this raises the importance of its screening, assessment and treatment. The importance of pain is attested by the fact that it is considered the fifth vital sign for indicating basic bodily functions, health and quality of life, together with the four other vital signs: blood pressure, body temperature, pulse rate and respiratory rate. However, while these four signals represent an objective physical parameter, the occurrence of pain expresses an emotional status that happens inside the mind of each individual and therefore, is highly subjective that makes difficult its management and evaluation. For this reason, the self-report of pain is considered the most accurate pain assessment method wherein patients should be asked to periodically rate their pain severity and related symptoms. Thus, in the last years computerised systems based on mobile and web technologies are becoming increasingly used to enable patients to report their pain which lead to the development of electronic pain diaries (ED). This approach may provide to health care professionals (HCP) and patients the ability to interact with the system anywhere and at anytime thoroughly changes the coordinates of time and place and offers invaluable opportunities to the healthcare delivery. However, most of these systems were designed to interact directly to patients without presence of a healthcare professional or without evidence of reliability and accuracy. In fact, the observation of the existing systems revealed lack of integration with mobile devices, limited use of web-based interfaces and reduced interaction with patients in terms of obtaining and viewing information. In addition, the reliability and accuracy of computerised systems for pain management are rarely proved or their effects on HCP and patients outcomes remain understudied. This thesis is focused on technology for pain management and aims to propose a monitoring system which includes ubiquitous interfaces specifically oriented to either patients or HCP using mobile devices and Internet so as to allow decisions based on the knowledge obtained from the analysis of the collected data. With the interoperability and cloud computing technologies in mind this system uses web services (WS) to manage data which are stored in a Personal Health Record (PHR). A Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT) was implemented so as to determine the effectiveness of the proposed computerised monitoring system. The six weeks RCT evidenced the advantages provided by the ubiquitous access to HCP and patients so as to they were able to interact with the system anywhere and at anytime using WS to send and receive data. In addition, the collected data were stored in a PHR which offers integrity and security as well as permanent on line accessibility to both patients and HCP. The study evidenced not only that the majority of participants recommend the system, but also that they recognize it suitability for pain management without the requirement of advanced skills or experienced users. Furthermore, the system enabled the definition and management of patient-oriented treatments with reduced therapist time. The study also revealed that the guidance of HCP at the beginning of the monitoring is crucial to patients' satisfaction and experience stemming from the usage of the system as evidenced by the high correlation between the recommendation of the application, and it suitability to improve pain management and to provide medical information. There were no significant differences regarding to improvements in the quality of pain treatment between intervention group and control group. Based on the data collected during the RCT a clinical decision support system (CDSS) was developed so as to offer capabilities of tailored alarms, reports, and clinical guidance. This CDSS, called Patient Oriented Method of Pain Evaluation System (POMPES), is based on the combination of several statistical models (one-way ANOVA, Kruskal-Wallis and Tukey-Kramer) with an imputation model based on linear regression. This system resulted in fully accuracy related to decisions suggested by the system compared with the medical diagnosis, and therefore, revealed it suitability to manage the pain. At last, based on the aerospace systems capability to deal with different complex data sources with varied complexities and accuracies, an innovative model was proposed. This model is characterized by a qualitative analysis stemming from the data fusion method combined with a quantitative model based on the comparison of the standard deviation together with the values of mathematical expectations. This model aimed to compare the effects of technological and pen-and-paper systems when applied to different dimension of pain, such as: pain intensity, anxiety, catastrophizing, depression, disability and interference. It was observed that pen-and-paper and technology produced equivalent effects in anxiety, depression, interference and pain intensity. On the contrary, technology evidenced favourable effects in terms of catastrophizing and disability. The proposed method revealed to be suitable, intelligible, easy to implement and low time and resources consuming. Further work is needed to evaluate the proposed system to follow up participants for longer periods of time which includes a complementary RCT encompassing patients with chronic pain symptoms. Finally, additional studies should be addressed to determine the economic effects not only to patients but also to the healthcare system

Is the timed-up and go test feasible in mobile devices? A systematic review

The number of older adults is increasing worldwide, and it is expected that by 2050 over 2 billion individuals will be more than 60 years old. Older adults are exposed to numerous pathological problems such as Parkinson’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, post-stroke, and orthopedic disturbances. Several physiotherapy methods that involve measurement of movements, such as the Timed-Up and Go test, can be done to support efficient and effective evaluation of pathological symptoms and promotion of health and well-being. In this systematic review, the authors aim to determine how the inertial sensors embedded in mobile devices are employed for the measurement of the different parameters involved in the Timed-Up and Go test. The main contribution of this paper consists of the identification of the different studies that utilize the sensors available in mobile devices for the measurement of the results of the Timed-Up and Go test. The results show that mobile devices embedded motion sensors can be used for these types of studies and the most commonly used sensors are the magnetometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope available in off-the-shelf smartphones. The features analyzed in this paper are categorized as quantitative, quantitative + statistic, dynamic balance, gait properties, state transitions, and raw statistics. These features utilize the accelerometer and gyroscope sensors and facilitate recognition of daily activities, accidents such as falling, some diseases, as well as the measurement of the subject's performance during the test execution.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Internet of Things Architectures, Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions for Enhanced Living Environments and Healthcare Systems: A Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that o er an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant scientific innovations make it possible to develop IoT devices through countless services for sensing, data fusing, and logging capabilities that lead to several advancements for enhanced living environments (ELEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art on IoT architectures for ELEs and healthcare systems, with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, opportunities, open-source platforms, and operating systems. Furthermore, this document synthesizes the existing body of knowledge and identifies common threads and gaps that open up new significant and challenging future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From data acquisition to data fusion : a comprehensive review and a roadmap for the identification of activities of daily living using mobile devices

This paper focuses on the research on the state of the art for sensor fusion techniques, applied to the sensors embedded in mobile devices, as a means to help identify the mobile device user’s daily activities. Sensor data fusion techniques are used to consolidate the data collected from several sensors, increasing the reliability of the algorithms for the identification of the different activities. However, mobile devices have several constraints, e.g., low memory, low battery life and low processing power, and some data fusion techniques are not suited to this scenario. The main purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the state of the art to identify examples of sensor data fusion techniques that can be applied to the sensors available in mobile devices aiming to identify activities of daily living (ADLs)

Módulo de planeamento do processo de gestão no SIAG-AP

Trabalho de projecto de mestrado, Engenharia Informática, Universidade de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências, 2008Este documento descreve o trabalho realizado no âmbito da disciplina de Projecto em Engenharia Informática do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática da Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa. Este projecto, desenvolvido na GEDI S.A., teve como principal objectivo criar uma ferramenta que auxilie as organizações na tomada de decisões de maneira a melhorar o seu desempenho no negócio. A técnica utilizada para se conseguir isto denomina-se BPM (Business Performance Management). É uma técnica que se pode considerar uma evolução dos sistemas de BI (Business Intelligence) convencionais. O projecto foi desenvolvido utilizando um conjunto de frameworks open source, sendo a linguagem de programação base o JAVA, na plataforma J2EE, e para as camadas de interface, negócio e dados: Struts ou JavaServer Pages, Spring e Hibernate correspondentemente. Para auxiliar no desenho de gráficos foi usada a ferramenta FusionCharts em conjunto com o Java. Foi ainda utilizada a tecnologia JavaServer Faces para a parte de forecasting do projecto. A ferramenta desenvolvida funciona de forma integrada com o sistema SIAG-AP (Sistema Integrado de Apoio à Gestão para a Administração Pública) desenvolvido pela GEDI.This document describes the work done in the scope of the University of Lisbon Master Degree in Informatics Engineering discipline Projecto em Engenharia Informática. The main goal of the project, developed at GEDI S.A. was to create a tool that would help organizations in decision making, in a way to improve their business performance. The technique used to achieve this goal is called BPM (Business Performance Management). This technique can be considered to be an evolution of the conventional BI (Business Intelligence) systems. The project was made using a set of open source frameworks, being Java, with the J2EE framework, the main programming language, and for the interface, business and data layers: Struts or JavaServer Pages, Spring and Hibernate. To help in the graphics design, the FusionCharts tool and Java were used. JavaServer Faces was also used for the project’s forecasting part. The developed tool works integrated with GEDI’s SIAG-AP (Sistema Integrado de Apoio à Gestão para a Administração Pública) system

Towards an accurate sleep apnea detection based on ECG signal: The quintessential of a wise feature selection

A wise feature selection from minute-to-minute Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is a challenging task for many reasons, but mostly because of the promise of the accurate detection of clinical disorders, such as the sleep apnea. In this study, the ECG signal was modeled in order to obtain the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and the ECG-Derived Respiration (EDR). Selected features techniques were used for benchmark with different classifiers such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machine(SVM), among others. The results evidence that the best accuracy was 82.12%, with a sensitivity and specificity of 88.41% and 72.29%, respectively. In addition, experiments revealed that a wise feature selection may improve the system accuracy. Therefore, the proposed model revealed to be reliable and simpler alternative to classical solutions for the sleep apnea detection, for example the ones based on the Polysomnography.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Teaching in conditions of difficult knowledge transfer due to the state of emergency caused by the pandemic

Introduction/purpose: This paper presents the transformation of the current, classical approach to teaching. Online platforms enable students with and without disabilities to follow classes without hindrance during the lecture period. After the lecture, they are allowed to view video and presentation materials. The main advantage of this way of teaching is the possibility of attending classes from any location and from any device; it is only important to be connected to the Internet. Methods: Full integration with the already existing Faculty Information System has been performed. The paper describes a new approach to teaching and illustrates the expected benefits of online teaching. The platforms used in this integration are Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Office 365 Admin, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Stream and Microsoft SharePoint. Results: The result of the test of work with students showed that by introducing a system for online teaching, we directly affect the improvement and quality of teaching. Conclusion: Considering all the results, it can be concluded that the transition to the online way of teaching allows end listeners a comprehensive transfer of knowledge as well as re-listening to the same. This model can be used for an unlimited number of users in all Institutions, regardless of whether the field of activity of these Institutions is of educational origin.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio