Evaluation of spatial-temporal anomalies in the analysis of human movement

The dissemination of Internet of Things solutions, such as smartphones, lead to the appearance of devices that allow to monitor the activities of their users. In manufacture, the performed tasks consist on sets of predetermined movements that are exhaustively repeated, forming a repetitive behaviour. Additionally, there are planned and unplanned events on manufacturing production lines which cause the repetitive behaviour to stop. The execution of improper movements and the existence of events that might prejudice the productive system are regarded as anomalies. In this work, it was investigated the feasibility of the evaluation of spatial-temporal anomaly detection in the analysis of human movement. It is proposed a framework capable of detecting anomalies in generic repetitive time series, thus being adequate to handle Human motion from industrial scenarios. The proposed framework consists of (1) a new unsupervised segmentation algorithm; (2) feature extraction, selection and dimensionality reduction; (3) unsupervised classification based on DBSCAN used to distinguish normal and anomalous instances. The proposed solution was applied in four different datasets. Two of those datasets were synthetic and two were composed of real-world data, namely, electrocardiography data and human movement in manufacture. The yielded results demonstrated not only that anomaly detection in human motion is possible, but that the developed framework is generic and, with examples, it was shown that it may be applied in general repetitive time series with little adaptation effort for different domains. The results showed that the proposed framework has the potential to be applied in manufacturing production lines to monitor the employees movements, acting as a tool to detect both planned and unplanned events, and ultimately reduce the risk of appearance of musculoskeletal disorders in industrial settings in long-term

Escetamina na Depressão Resistente ao Tratamento: O Caminho para a Remissão

Major depressive disorder affects an estimate of 5% of the population with nearly 1‑third of patients failing to achieve remission with conventional pharmacological treatment. Esketamine, a novel rapid‑acting antidepressant, with a noncompetitive antagonism on N‑methyl‑D‑Aspartate receptor, have been recently approved by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and European Medicines Agency (EMA) for treatment‑resistant depression. Here, we report a clinical case of a 42‑year‑old Caucasian woman who endured many years with severe depressive symptoms and high functional impairment. Previous treatments included cognitive behavioral therapy, numerous pharmacological trials with antidepressants and augmentation agents, and neurostimulation approaches. Upon treatment with esketamine, the patient presented remarkable clinical recovery. Psychometric assessments determined an acute reduction on the MADRS score after 1 week and progressive recovery of the depressive symptoms on the following weeks. Likewise, PHQ‑9 scale assessments, evaluating the relative frequency of depressive symptoms. and the Sheehan scale, assessing functional recovery, also determined a pronounced symptomatic relief.A perturbação depressiva major afeta cerca de 5% da população e quase 1‑terço dos doentes não consegue atingir remissão com o tratamento farmacológico convencional. Escetamina, um novo antidepressivo de ação rápida, com antagonismo não competitivo do receptor N‑metil‑D‑aspartato, foi recentemente aprovado pela Food and Drug Administration (FDA) e European Medicines Agency (EMA) para o tratamento de depressão resistente ao tratamento. Aqui, relatamos o caso clínico de uma mulher caucasiana de 42 anos que padeceu durante muitos anos de sintomas depressivos graves e de grande compromisso funcional. Os tratamentos anteriores incluíram terapia cognitivo‑comportamental, vários ciclos de tratamento farmacológico com antidepressivos e agentes de aumento e técnicas de neuroestimulação. Após tratamento com escetamina, a doente apresentou uma notável recuperação clínica. Avaliações psicométricas determinaram uma redução considerável na pontuação MADRS após uma semana e recuperação progressiva dos sintomas depressivos nas semanas seguintes. Da mesma forma, as avaliações com a escala de PHQ‑9, que avalia a frequência relativa de sintomas depressivos, e a escala de Sheehan, que avalia a recuperação funcional, também determinaram alívio sintomático muito pronunciado

Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone

As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved