Comparison of different methods for work accidents investigation in hospitals: A Portuguese case study

BACKGROUND: The hospital environment has many occupational health risks that predispose healthcare workers to various kinds of work accidents. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to compare different methods for work accidents investigation and to verify their suitability in hospital environment. METHODS: For this purpose, we selected three types of accidents that were related with needle stick, worker fall and inadequate effort/movement during the mobilization of patients. A total of thirty accidents were analysed with six different work accidents investigation methods. RESULTS: The results showed that organizational factors were the group of causes which had the greatest impact in the three types of work accidents. CONCLUSIONS: The methods selected to be compared in this paper are applicable and appropriate for the work accidents investigation in hospitals. However, the Registration, Research and Analysis of Work Accidents method (RIAAT) showed to be an optimal technique to use in this context.

Análise e identificação do sinal de aceleração num pé

Com a massificação do uso da tecnologia no dia-a-dia, os sistemas de localização têm vindo a aumentar a sua popularidade, devido à grande diversidade de funcionalidades que proporcionam e aplicações a que se destinam. No entanto, a maior parte dos sistemas de posicionamento não funcionam adequadamente em ambientes indoor, impedindo o desenvolvimento de aplicações de localização nestes ambientes. Os acelerómetros são muito utilizados nos sistemas de localização inercial, pelas informações que fornecem acerca das acelerações sofridas por um corpo. Para tal, neste trabalho, recorrendo à análise do sinal de aceleração provindo de um acelerómetro, propõe-se uma técnica baseada na deteção de passos para que, em aplicações futuras, possa constituir-se como um recurso a utilizar para calcular a posição do utilizador dentro de um edifício. Neste sentido, este trabalho tem como objetivo contribuir para o desenvolvimento da análise e identificação do sinal de aceleração obtido num pé, por forma a determinar a duração de um passo e o número de passos dados. Para alcançar o objetivo de estudo foram analisados, com recurso ao Matlab, um conjunto de 12 dados de aceleração (para marcha normal, rápida e corrida) recolhidos por um sistema móvel (e provenientes de um acelerómetro). A partir deste estudo exploratório tornou-se possível apresentar um algoritmo baseado no método de deteção de pico e na utilização de filtros de mediana e Butterworth passa-baixo para a contagem de passos, que apresentou bons resultados. Por forma a validar as informações obtidas nesta fase, procedeu-se, seguidamente, à realização de um conjunto de testes experimentais a partir da recolha de 33 novos dados para a marcha e corrida. Identificaram-se o número de passos efetuados, o tempo médio de passo e da passada e a percentagem de erro como as variáveis em estudo. Obteve-se uma percentagem de erro igual a 1% para o total dos dados recolhidos de 20, 100, 500 e 1000 passos com a aplicação do método proposto para a contagem do passo. Não obstante as dificuldades observadas na análise dos sinais de aceleração relativos à corrida, o algoritmo proposto mostrou bom desempenho, conseguindo valores próximos aos esperados. Os resultados obtidos permitem afirmar que foi possível atingir-se o objetivo de estudo com sucesso. Sugere-se, no entanto, o desenvolvimento de futuras investigações de forma a alargar estes resultados em outras direções.

The influence of task design on upper limb muscles fatigue during low-load repetitive work: A systematic review

Ergonomic interventions such as increased scheduled breaks or job rotation have been proposed to reduce upper limb muscle fatigue in repetitive low-load work. This review was performed to summarize and analyze the studies investigating the effect of job rotation and work-rest schemes, as well as, work pace, cycle time and duty cycle, on upper limb muscle fatigue. The effects of these work organization factors on subjective fatigue or discomfort were also analyzed. This review was based on relevant articles published in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science. The studies included in this review were performed in humans and assessed muscle fatigue in upper limbs. 14 articles were included in the systematic review. Few studies were performed in a real work environment and the most common methods used to assess muscle fatigue were surface electromyography (EMG). No consistent results were found related to the effects of job rotation on muscle activity and subjective measurements of fatigue. Rest breaks had some positive effects, particularly in perceived discomfort. The increase in work pace reveals a higher muscular load in specific muscles. The duration of experiments and characteristics of participants appear to be the factors that most have influenced the results. Future research should be focused on the improvement of the experimental protocols and instrumentation, in order to the outcomes represent adequately the actual working conditions. Relevance to industry: Introducing more physical workload variation in low-load repetitive work is considered an effective ergonomic intervention against muscle fatigue and musculoskeletal disorders in industry. Results will be useful to identify the need of future research, which will eventually lead to the adoption of best industrial work practices according to the workers capabilities.

Manoeuvre Based Mission Control System for an Autonomous Surface Vehicle

In this work the mission control and supervision system developed for the ROAZ Autonomous Surface Vehicle is presented. Complexity in mission requirements coupled with flexibility lead to the design of a modular hierarchical mission control system based on hybrid systems control. Monitoring and supervision control for a vehicle such as ROAZ mission is not an easy task using tools with low complexity and yet powerful enough. A set of tools were developed to perform both on board mission control and remote planning and supervision. “ROAZ- Mission Control” was developed to be used in support to bathymetric and security missions performed in river and at seas.

Radar Based Collision detection developments on USV ROAZ II

This work presents the integration of obstacle detection and analysis capabilities in a coherent and advanced C&C framework allowing mixed-mode control in unmanned surface systems. The collision avoidance work has been successfully integrated in an operational autonomous surface vehicle and demonstrated in real operational conditions. We present the collision avoidance system, the ROAZ autonomous surface vehicle and the results obtained at sea tests. Limitations of current COTS radar systems are also discussed and further research directions are proposed towards the development and integration of advanced collision avoidance systems taking in account the different requirements in unmanned surface vehicles.

Autonomous Surface Vehicle Docking Manoeuvre with Visual Information

This work presents a hybrid coordinated manoeuvre for docking an autonomous surface vehicle with an autonomous underwater vehicle. The control manoeuvre uses visual information to estimate the AUV relative position and attitude in relation to the ASV and steers the ASV in order to dock with the AUV. The AUV is assumed to be at surface with only a small fraction of its volume visible. The system implemented in the autonomous surface vehicle ROAZ, developed by LSA-ISEP to perform missions in river environment, test autonomous AUV docking capabilities and multiple AUV/ASV coordinated missions is presented. Information from a low cost embedded robotics vision system (LSAVision), along with inertial navigation sensors is fused in an extended Kalman filter and used to determine AUV relative position and orientation to the surface vehicle The real time vision processing system is described and results are presented in operational scenario.

Marine Operations with the SWORDFISH Autonomous Surface Vehicle

IEEE Robótica 2007 - 7th Conference on Mobile Robots and Competitions, Paderne, Portugal 2007

Semi-Partitioned Scheduling of Fork-Join Tasks using Work-Stealing

13th IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing (EUC 2015). 21 to 23, Oct, 2015, Session W1-A: Multiprocessing and Multicore Architectures. Porto, Portugal.

Towards the Combination of Work-Stealing and Semi-Partitioned Scheduling for Parallel Tasks

Paper/Poster presented in Work in Progress Session, 28th GI/ITG International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2015). 24 to 26, Mar, 2015. Porto, Portugal.

Towards the Combination of Work-Stealing and Semi-Partitioned Scheduling for Parallel Tasks

Poster presented in Work in Progress Session, 28th GI/ITG International Conference on Architecture of Computing Systems (ARCS 2015). 24 to 26, Mar, 2015. Porto, Portugal.

A New Electronic Approach for the Surgical Safety Checklist

To improve surgical safety, and to reduce the mortality and surgical complications incidence, the World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Surgical Safety Checklist (SSC). The SSC is a support of information that aids health professionals to reduce the number of complications, induction of anaesthesia, period before skin incision and period before leaving the operating room (OR). The SSC was tested in several countries of the world and their results shown that after introduction of the SSC the incidence of patient complication lowered from 11.0% to 7.0% (P<0.001), the rate of death declined from 1.5% to 0.8% (P = 0.003) and the nurses recognized that patients identity was more often con rmed (81.6% to 94.2%, P<0.01) in many institutions. Recently the SSC was also implemented in Portuguese hospitals, which led us to its study in the real clinical environment. An observational study was performed: several health professionals were observed and interviewed, to understand the functioning of the SSC in an OR, during the clinical routine. The objective of this study was to understand the current use of the SSC, and how it may be improved in terms of usability, taking advantage of the technological advancements such as mobile applications. During two days were observed 14 surgeries, only 2 surgeries met the requirements for the three phases of the SSC, as de ned by the WHO. Of the remaining 12 observed surgeries, 9 surgeries completed the last phase at the correct time. It was also observed that only in 2 surgeries all the phases of the SSC were read aloud to the team and that, in 7 surgeries, several items were read aloud and answered but no one was checking the SSC, only after the end of the phase. The observational study results disclose that several health professionals do not meet with rules of the WHO manual. This study demonstrates that it is urgent to change the mindset of health professionals, and that di erent features in the SSC may be useful to make it more easy to use. With the results of the observational study, a SSC application proposal was developed with new functionalities to improve and aid the health professional in its use. In this application the user can chose between a SSC already created to a speci c surgery or to create a new SSC, adding and adapting some questions from the WHO standard. To create a new SSC, the application is connected to an online questionnaire builder (JotForm). The choice for this online questionnaire builder went through three essential characteristics: number of types of questions, mainly checkbox, radio button and text; the possibility of to create sections inside sections and the API. In addition, in this proposal the improvements are focused in forcing the user to focus in the work ow of the SSC and to save the input timestamps and any actions made by them. Therefore, the following features was implemented to achieve that goal: display one item of the SSC at a time; display the stage where the SSC is; do not allow going back to the previous step; do not allow going forward to the next item if the current is not lled; do not allow going forward to the next item if the time it took to ll the item was too short and log any action made by the user.

Quality-of-service aware routing for static and mobile IPv6-based low-power and lossy sensor networks using RPL

The Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a paradigm over the last few years as a result of the tight integration of the computing and the physical world. The requirement of remote sensing makes low-power wireless sensor networks one of the key enabling technologies of IoT. These networks encompass several challenges, especially in communication and networking, due to their inherent constraints of low-power features, deployment in harsh and lossy environments, and limited computing and storage resources. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [1] was proposed by the IETF ROLL (Routing Over Low-power Lossy links) working group and is currently adopted as an IETF standard in the RFC 6550 since March 2012. Although RPL greatly satisfied the requirements of low-power and lossy sensor networks, several issues remain open for improvement and specification, in particular with respect to Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees and support for mobility. In this paper, we focus mainly on the RPL routing protocol. We propose some enhancements to the standard specification in order to provide QoS guarantees for static as well as mobile LLNs. For this purpose, we propose OF-FL (Objective Function based on Fuzzy Logic), a new objective function that overcomes the limitations of the standardized objective functions that were designed for RPL by considering important link and node metrics, namely end-to-end delay, number of hops, ETX (Expected transmission count) and LQL (Link Quality Level). In addition, we present the design of Co-RPL, an extension to RPL based on the corona mechanism that supports mobility in order to overcome the problem of slow reactivity to frequent topology changes and thus providing a better quality of service mainly in dynamic networks application. Performance evaluation results show that both OF-FL and Co-RPL allow a great improvement when compared to the standard specification, mainly in terms of packet loss ratio and average network latency. 2015 Elsevier B.V. Al

Aceitação dos pagamentos móveis em Portugal

O presente estudo pretende ser uma reflexão exploratória sobre a emergência dos serviços de pagamento através de dispositivos móveis. O tema do pagamento é novo em Portugal, e não obstante a grande adesão a inúmeras outras competências proporcionadas pela adesão aos smartphones. Estando o fenómeno numa fase de implementação embrionária considerámos que uma abordagem qualitativa melhor se adequava ao seu estudo. Assim o presente trabalho consiste numa revisão de literatura descrevendo o estado da arte que articula com uma recolha de entrevistas e e posterior análise. Com este trabalho podemos concluir que o fenómeno de pagamentos móveis requer ainda comunicação e vontade institucional dos vários intervenientes que ajude a sua disseminação e promova uma maior aceitação

Laboratório de criação digital

O projeto aqui apresentado consiste no desenvolvimento de um plano estratégico de marketing digital para o projeto Laboratório de Criação Digital (LCDPorto). O LCDPorto tem sete anos de existência, sem nunca ter definido uma estratégia de comunicação. O principal objetivo passa por aprofundar os vários temas que integram Marketing Digital, e desenvolver um plano que permita ao LCDPorto ganhar mais notoriedade pelas atividades que desenvolve e, também, obter mais público para participar nas atividades. Áreas como email marketing, contente marketing, SEO, social media e outras, não são áreas que funcionam de forma independente, mas sim, parte de um plano estratégico. Neste relatório serão apresentados alguns dos passos deste plano, nomeadamente Análise de Concorrência Online, estratégia de SEO, com o objetivo de obter dados prévios essenciais ao desenvolvimento desta estratégia de Marketing Digital.

Avaliação das melhores técnicas disponíveis relativas à refrigeração industrial e às emissões resultantes da armazenagem

Esta dissertação foi realizada em colaboração com o grupo empresarial Monteiro, Ribas e teve como principais objetivos efetuar uma avaliação das melhores técnicas disponíveis relativas à refrigeração industrial e às emissões resultantes da armazenagem. O primeiro objetivo teve como alvo todas as instalações da Monteiro, Ribas enquanto que o segundo objetivo se debruçou sobre Monteiro, Ribas, Embalagens Flexíveis, S.A.. Para cumprir estes objetivos, inicialmente efetuou-se um levantamento das melhores técnicas disponíveis apresentadas nos respetivos documentos de referência. Em seguida selecionaram-se as técnicas que se adequavam às condições e às instalações em estudo e procedeu-se a uma avaliação de forma a verificar o grau de implementação das medidas sugeridas no BREF (Best Available Techniques Reference Document). Relativamente aos sistemas de refrigeração industrial verificou-se que estão implementadas quase todas as medidas referenciadas no respetivo documento de referência. Isto prende-se com o facto dos sistemas de refrigeração existentes no complexo industrial Monteiro, Ribas serem relativamente recentes. Foram implementados no ano de 2012, e são caracterizados por apresentarem uma conceção moderna com elevada eficiência. No que diz respeito à armazenagem de produtos químicos perigosos, a instalação em estudo, apresenta algumas inconformidades, uma vez que a maioria das técnicas mencionadas no BREF não se encontram implementadas, pelo que foi necessário efetuar uma avaliação de riscos ambientais, com recurso à metodologia proposta pela Norma Espanhola UNE 150008:2008 – Análise e Avaliação do Risco Ambiental. Para isso procedeu-se então à formulação de vários cenários de riscos e à quantificação de riscos para à Monteiro, Ribas Embalagens Flexíveis S.A., tendo-se apurado que os riscos estavam avaliados como moderados a altos. Por fim foram sugeridas algumas medidas de prevenção e de minimização do risco que a instalação deve aplicar, como por exemplo, o parque de resíduos perigosos deve ser equipado com kits de contenção de derrames (material absorvente), procedimentos a realizar em caso de emergência, fichas de dados de segurança e o extintor deve ser colocado num local de fácil visualização. No transporte de resíduos perigosos, para o respetivo parque, é aconselhável utilizar bacias de contenção de derrames portáteis e kits de contenção de derrames. Relativamente ao armazém de produtos químicos perigosos é recomendado que se proceda a sua reformulação tendo em conta as MTD apresentadas no subcapítulo 5.2.3 desta dissertação.