Validação de conteúdo do instrumento para consulta de enfermagem na visita domiciliar às pessoas com lesão medular: um enfoque no autocuidado

This study aimed to validate the contents of an Instrument for Nursing Consultation in the Home Visit of people with Spinal Cord Injury (INCEVDOP-LM), based on the Self-Care Deficit Theory. The methodological development study was conducted with spinal cord injured (SCI) people ascribed in the Family Health Units the city of Natal/RN/Brazil, and with the nurses of these institutions. The study was conducted from Januray 2012 to January 2013 in two phases: the first aimed to identify the need for self-care of persons with SCI, and the second to develop and validate the INCEVDOP-LM. The first phase consisted of a census study of people with SCI living in Natal/RN. In the second phase, a non-probabilistic convencience sample of subjects was selected to form two groups: First stage - Group 1 of the first stage was comprised by 73 adults with SCI diagnosed with paraplegia or tetraplegia, with cognitive function preserved and that were registered to some family health unit; Group 2 of the Second phase was composed of six experts that were nurses with doctoral formation, scientific experience in the area of technology development or assistance to persons with SCI, and with publications in periodicals Qualis A2. Data collection of the first phase was conducted through home visits of people with SCI that responded three instruments: Questionnaire I (comprised of demographic and socioeconomic variables), The Competency Rating Scale for Self-care (ASA) and the Barthel Index (an instrument for evaluation of functional capacity). The research for the second phase was conducted in two stages: I-construction of the INCEVDOP LM; II-validation of the INCEVDOP-LM. The instrument and an evaluation form were forwarded to the experts for the validation. The correlations between the responses were analyzed by the Kappa test, with accepting values of>0.75. The evaluation criteria were: organization, clarity, simplicity, readability, appropriateness of vocabulary, objectivity, accuracy, reliability and suitability and the positive responses with frequency values of≥90% were considered excellent. The chi-square test was used to investigate the differences between proportions. The study attended to the principles of Human Rights CNS Resolution 196/96. Results were reported by means of four articles derived from the study. The findings indicate that the items that showed disagreement among experts (k=0.02) were diagnoses, interventions and evaluation of the nursing features pertaining to the domains of Nutrition, Hygiene, Elimination, Physical, Social and Psychological, and of the Ability to perform work activities feature. Agreement among the experts were reported for the other items, with kappa ranging from 0.72 to 1. After removing items with disagreement, all criteria achieved excellent rates and no significant differences were observed between the proportions of responses of evaluation of experts (p>0.05). We conclude that the instrument shows validity to serve as a guide for nurses to conduct a systematic consultation during the home visit to people with spinal cord injury, with emphasis on self-care. The instrument must go through other levels of validation when applied in the clinical setting

Validação de instrumentos para avaliação da habilidade e do conhecimento acerca da medida da pressão arterial

This study aimed to validate tools for evaluating the ability and knowledge about blood pressure (BP) among nursing students. It is a cross-sectional, descriptive, quantitative and methodological study accomplished at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte (UERN) and a private university of the state. The sample consisted of 27 judges of research selected from the inclusion criteria: nursing, teachers of the semiology and/or semiotics discipline, with at least 1 year of experience, being from UFRN, EEN, UERN and private university of the state and and agree to participate voluntarily with the signing of the consent form. The research was development in three stages: construction of two instruments based on the scientific literature, resulting in a structured checklist consists of 28 items and a knowledge questionnaire with 12 questions; submission of the instruments to the judges, in the period from June to September 2012, which should evaluate each item in appropriate , appropriate with changes and inappropriate , addition to making an overall assessment of each instrument based on 10 requirements; validation and verification to the level of agreement among the judges, through the application of Kappa and Content Validity Index (CVI). Was used the consensus level greater than 0.61 (good) to the Kappa index and greater than 0.75 for CVI. Was approved by the Ethics in Research / HUOL. After being coded and tabulated, the data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Of the 27 judges who evaluated the instrument, 77.8% are female, with a mean age of 36.6 (± 9.0) years, 63.0% worked in UFRN, 74.1% had academic master and 63.0% worked exclusively on teaching. Average length of teaching experience was 7.9 (± 8.0) years and in the semiology and/or semiotics discipline of 5.5 (± 6.7) years. In the judgment of structured checklist and questionnaire of knowledge about blood pressure mensurement any item/question was considered inappropriate since all obtained level of agreement within the indices established (CVI> 0,75 E Kappa> 0.61). In relation to structured checklist, of those 28 items present, 9 showed perfect concordance index (CVI = 1.00, Kappa = 1.00) and another 19 were considered appropriate with changes, especially with regard to clarity and vocabulary. In the questionnaire of knowledge, among the 12 questions that comprised, 7 had perfect concordance index and the others were considered appropriate with changes as requirements as clarity, vocabulary, and feasible sequence of instructional topics. In terms of a overall evaluating of instruments, the structured checklist got CVI of 0.94 and Kappa of 0.89 and the knowledge questionnaire, CVI of 0.97 and a kappa of 0.94. Both instruments proved to be valid as to their content, configuring it as clear and objective tools of assessment of knowledge and ability on blood pressure, being of nursing students as well as others students and health professionals, since the use of valid measures seeking to reduce the risk of distorting the results

Busca heurística através de algoritmo genético e memético com construção de vocábulos para o problema de atribuição de localidades a anéis Sonet

Telecommunications play a key role in contemporary society. However, as new technologies are put into the market, it also grows the demanding for new products and services that depend on the offered infrastructure, making the problems of planning telecommunications networks, despite the advances in technology, increasingly larger and complex. However, many of these problems can be formulated as models of combinatorial optimization, and the use of heuristic algorithms can help solving these issues in the planning phase. In this project it was developed two pure metaheuristic implementations Genetic algorithm (GA) and Memetic Algorithm (MA) plus a third hybrid implementation Memetic Algorithm with Vocabulary Building (MA+VB) for a problem in telecommunications that is known in the literature as Problem SONET Ring Assignment Problem or SRAP. The SRAP arises during the planning stage of the physical network and it consists in the selection of connections between a number of locations (customers) in order to meet a series of restrictions on the lowest possible cost. This problem is NP-hard, so efficient exact algorithms (in polynomial complexity ) are not known and may, indeed, even exist

Heurísticas usando construção de vocabuilário aplicadas ao problema da atribuição de localidades a anéis em redes SONET/SDH

The SONET/SDH Ring Assignment Problem (PALAS) treats to group localities in form of some rings, being respected the traffic's limitations of the equipment. Each ring uses a DXC (Digital Cross Connect) to make the communication with the others, being the DXC the equipment most expensive of the net, minimizing the number total of rings, will minimize the total net cost, problem's objective . This topology in rings provides a bigger capacity of regeneration. The PALAS is a problem in Combinatorial Optimization of NP-hard Class. It can be solved through Heuristics and Metaheuristics. In this text, we use Taboo Search while we keep a set of elite solutions to be used in the formation of a part of the collection of vocabulary's parts that in turn will be used in the Vocabulary Building. The Vocabulary Building will be started case Taboo Search does not reach the best solution for the instance. Three approaches had been implemented: one that only uses vocabulary's parts deriving of Taboo Search, one that it only uses vocabulary's parts randomly generated and a last one that it uses half come of the elite and half randomly generated

Algoritmo evolutivo paralelo para o problema de atribuição de localidades a anéis em redes sonet/sdh

The telecommunications play a fundamental role in the contemporary society, having as one of its main roles to give people the possibility to connect them and integrate them into society in which they operate and, therewith, accelerate development through knowledge. But as new technologies are introduced on the market, increases the demand for new products and services that depend on the infrastructure offered, making the problems of planning of telecommunication networks become increasingly large and complex. Many of these problems, however, can be formulated as combinatorial optimization models, and the use of heuristic algorithms can help solve these issues in the planning phase. This paper proposes the development of a Parallel Evolutionary Algorithm to be applied to telecommunications problem known in the literature as SONET Ring Assignment Problem SRAP. This problem is the class NP-hard and arises during the physical planning of a telecommunication network and consists of determining the connections between locations (customers), satisfying a series of constrains of the lowest possible cost. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the Evolutionary Algorithm parallel, over other methods, to obtain solutions that are either optimal or very close to it

Um algoritmo híbrido para o problema de roteamento de veículos com frotas heterogêneas

This paper aims to propose a hybrid meta-heuristics for the Heterogeneous Fleet Vehicle Routing Problem (HVRP), which is a combinatorial optimization problem NP-hard, and is characterized by the use of a limited fleet consists of different vehicles with different capacities. The hybrid method developed makes use of a memetic algorithm associated with the component optimizer Vocabulary Building. The resulting hybrid meta-heuristic was implemented in the programming language C + + and computational experiments generated good results in relation to meta-heuristic applied in isolation, proving the efficiency of the proposed method.

Metaheurísticas evolutivas para o problema de roteamento de unidades móveis de pistoneio

This paper presents metaheuristic strategies based on the framework of evolutionary algorithms (Genetic and Memetic) with the addition of Technical Vocabulary Building for solving the Problem of Optimizing the Use of Multiple Mobile Units Recovery of Oil (MRO units). Because it is an NP-hard problem, a mathematical model is formulated for the problem, allowing the construction of test instances that are used to validate the evolutionary metaheuristics developed

Fator de decisão na adoção de um sistema de micro-cogeração de energia a gás natural :um estudo em Hotéis três estrelas

The natural gas perform a essential paper, not only in primary sectors of energy, but also in others sectors of economy. The use natural gas will have expansion in Brazil, motivated by governmental decision to increase the participation of this fuel in the Brazilian energy matrix from 4% to 12% up until 2010. in order to reach the objective related to increase the consumption of natural gas in the energy matrix and to propose solutions to attend the electric requirements of heart and refrigeration, using natural gas as primary power plant. This thesis has a main objective to analysis the perception of businessmen of hotel sector about the feasability of investment with micro-cogeneration system by natural gas in their hotel in turistic sector, in Natal/RN. It s show a case for the hotels selected analyzing the actual knowledge of businessmen about alternative of new technology in generation of owner energy. There was make a interview using a standard form researching information about this topic. In this interview has shown 4 (four) canaries for businessmen with different configurations of investment in micro-cogeneration. Two of this canaries uses the project finance like option to make fasible this projects. The resulteis showed who businessmen has insecurity to make decision to put in office alone, or with a local company, and perhaps with a national company to perform for a alternative energy system, justifying, the alone feasability and without information by local businessmen. Apart from that, they are receptive for a option to put in office in micro-cogeneration configured in the settings using project finance

A leitura como instrumento facilitador da compreensão matemática

This research builds on a qualitative approach and proposes action research to develop, implement and evaluate a strategy grounded in the teaching of geometry reading from different text types, in order to enhance the understanding of mathematical concepts by students in the 6th grade of elementary school. The teaching of mathematics, strengthened by a reading practice that fosters a greater understanding of science, because it would contribute to the expansion of vocabulary, acquire a higher level of reasoning, interpretation and understanding, providing opportunities thus a greater contextualization of the student, making out the role of mere spectator to the builder of mathematical knowledge. As a methodological course comply with the following steps: selecting a field of intervention school, the class-subject (6 years of elementary school) and teacher-collaborator. Then there was a diagnostic activity involving the content of geometry - geometric solids, flat regions and contours - with the class chosen, and it was found, in addition to the unknown geometry, a great difficulty to contextualize it. From the analysis of the answers given by students, was drawn up and applied three interventional activities developed from various text (legends, poems, articles, artwork) for the purpose of leading the student to realize, through reading these texts, the discussions generated from these questions and activities proposed by the present mathematics in context, thus getting a better understanding and interaction with this discipline as hostility by most students. It was found from the intervention, the student had a greater ability to understand concepts, internalize information and use of geometry is more consistent and conscientious, and above all, learning math more enjoyable

A interpretação dos sintagmas nominais com adjetivos atributivos por alunos de inglês instrumental

This present work has as objective to analyze the interpretation of the syntactic and semantic meaning performed by third graders in the nominal groups (NGs) with attributive adjectives in the English language in a text of the final exam in the ESP (English for Specific Purposes) discipline. The corpus is made up of 30 exams of two classes from a third grade institution of the biomedical area, corresponding to the basic and advanced levels of the second term in 2006. The text has 24 NGs of different lexical content, a total of 27 NGs in the whole text summing up to 810 analyzed occurrences. The analysis is carried out at the morphologic, syntactic and semantic levels using as theoretical background the traditional and functional grammars (QUIRK et al, 1985; CELSE-MURCIA et al, 1998; TUCKER, 1998), in their semantic aspects, the Semantics (FRAWLEY, 1992) and the Cognitive Linguistics (TAYLOR, 2002). We concluded that the main difficulties were due to the lack of vocabulary and to the use of mother tongue strategies instead of using the top-down strategies for reading a text in English to compensate this gap. We also observed that even when the vocabulary was known, there were difficulties in establishing the semantic and syntactic relations between modifier and noun head. We suggested improvements for the teaching of reading English texts at the third grade grounded in the obtained results such as a more comprehensive study of the several different morphologic and syntactic structures of the NGs with premodifiers and their semantic consequences, an approach of the morphologic, syntactic and semantic aspects of the NGs and the use of both top-down and bottom-up strategies when reading a NG in the English language

Encoding mechanisms based on fast oscillations in the retina of the cat and their dependencies on anesthesia

Processing in the visual system starts in the retina. Its complex network of cells with different properties enables for parallel encoding and transmission of visual information to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) and to the cortex. In the retina, it has been shown that responses are often accompanied by fast synchronous oscillations (30 - 90 Hz) in a stimulus-dependent manner. Studies in the frog, rabbit, cat and monkey, have shown strong oscillatory responses to large stimuli which probably encode global stimulus properties, such as size and continuity (Neuenschwander and Singer, 1996; Ishikane et al., 2005). Moreover, simultaneous recordings from different levels in the visual system have demonstrated that the oscillatory patterning of retinal ganglion cell responses are transmitted to the cortex via the LGN (Castelo-Branco et al., 1998). Overall these results suggest that feedforward synchronous oscillations contribute to visual encoding. In the present study on the LGN of the anesthetized cat, we further investigate the role of retinal oscillations in visual processing by applying complex stimuli, such as natural visual scenes, light spots of varying size and contrast, and flickering checkerboards. This is a necessary step for understanding encoding mechanisms in more naturalistic conditions, as currently most data on retinal oscillations have been limited to simple, flashed and stationary stimuli. Correlation analysis of spiking responses confirmed previous results showing that oscillatory responses in the retina (observed here from the LGN responses) largely depend on the size and stationarity of the stimulus. For natural scenes (gray-level and binary movies) oscillations appeared only for brief moments probably when receptive fields were dominated by large continuous, flat-contrast surfaces. Moreover, oscillatory responses to a circle stimulus could be broken with an annular mask indicating that synchronization arises from relatively local interactions among populations of activated cells in the retina. A surprising finding in this study was that retinal oscillations are highly dependent on halothane anesthesia levels. In the absence of halothane, oscillatory activity vanished independent of the characteristics of the stimuli. The same results were obtained for isoflurane, which has similar pharmacological properties. These new and unexpected findings question whether feedfoward oscillations in the early visual system are simply due to an imbalance between excitation and inhibition in the retinal networks generated by the halogenated anesthetics. Further studies in awake behaving animals are necessary to extend these conclusions

The influence of visual inter-hemispheric connections on spiking, assembly and LFP activities, and their phase relationship during figure-ground stimulation

Desde os descobrimentos pioneiros de Hubel e Wiesel acumulou-se uma vasta literatura descrevendo as respostas neuronais do córtex visual primário (V1) a diferentes estímulos visuais. Estes estímulos consistem principalmente em barras em movimento, pontos ou grades, que são úteis para explorar as respostas dentro do campo receptivo clássico (CRF do inglês classical receptive field) a características básicas dos estímulos visuais como a orientação, direção de movimento, contraste, entre outras. Entretanto, nas últimas duas décadas, tornou-se cada vez mais evidente que a atividade de neurônios em V1 pode ser modulada por estímulos fora do CRF. Desta forma, áreas visuais primárias poderiam estar envolvidas em funções visuais mais complexas como, por exemplo, a separação de um objeto ou figura do seu fundo (segregação figura-fundo) e assume-se que as conexões intrínsecas de longo alcance em V1, assim como as conexões de áreas visuais superiores, estão ativamente envolvidas neste processo. Sua possível função foi inferida a partir da análise das variações das respostas induzidas por um estímulo localizado fora do CRF de neurônios individuais. Mesmo sendo muito provável que estas conexões tenham também um impacto tanto na atividade conjunta de neurônios envolvidos no processamento da figura quanto no potencial de campo, estas questões permanecem pouco estudadas. Visando examinar a modulação do contexto visual nessas atividades, coletamos potenciais de ação e potenciais de campo em paralelo de até 48 eletrodos implantados na área visual primária de gatos anestesiados. Estimulamos com grades compostas e cenas naturais, focando-nos na atividade de neurônios cujo CRF estava situado na figura. Da mesma forma, visando examinar a influência das conexões laterais, o sinal proveniente da área visual isotópica e contralateral foi removido através da desativação reversível por resfriamento. Fizemos isso devido a: i) as conexões laterais intrínsecas não podem ser facilmente manipuladas sem afetar diretamente os sinais que estão sendo medidos, ii) as conexões inter-hemisféricas compartilham as principais características anatômicas com a rede lateral intrínseca e podem ser vistas como uma continuação funcional das mesmas entre os dois hemisférios e iii) o resfriamento desativa as conexões de forma causal e reversível, silenciando temporariamente seu sinal, permitindo conclusões diretas a respeito da sua contribuição. Nossos resultados demonstram que o mecanismo de segmentação figurafundo se reflete nas taxas de disparo de neurônios individuais, assim como na potência do potencial de campo e na relação entre sua fase e os padrões de disparo produzidos pela população. Além disso, as conexões laterais inter-hemisféricas modulam estas variáveis dependendo da estimulação feita fora do CRF. Observamos também uma influência deste circuito lateral na coerência entre potenciais de campo entre eletrodos distantes. Em conclusão, nossos resultados dão suporte à ideia de um mecanismo complexo de segmentação figura-fundo atuando desde as áreas visuais primárias em diferentes escalas de frequência. Esse mecanismo parece envolver grupos de neurônios ativos sincronicamente e dependentes da fase do potencial de campo. Nossos resultados também são compatíveis com a hipótese que conexões laterais de longo alcance também fazem parte deste mecanismo

Papel de sinais cromáticos na identificação de parceiros sexuais em sagüi comum (callithrix jacchus)

The literature concerning color vision shows a trichromatic advantage in detecting ripe fruits and young leaves, but there are contradictory results. There is also the suggestion of this type of vision being adapted to perceive socio-sexual signals. Indeed, Old World primates utilize the skin color of conspecifics as a factor of attraction. But in New World primates there is no record of a coloration signal in the body that can be utilized by other group members. The present study aims to: 1- test whether there is a relation between coloration of body regions and ovulatory cycle in female Callithrix jacchus; 2- Determine if this species uses visual signals to choose mates that are sexually receptive. We collected feces from six females during one month to quantify progesterone concentration by EIA. Body region coloration was measured using a portable spectrometer and modeled to obtain the quantum catch of each photoreceptor, the opponency channels and chromatic distance between the points in units of JND. We recorded the behavior of six males exposed to three pairs of females with a cycling and a non-cycling female in each pair using a transparent plexiglass apparatus. The color of different body regions presented a correlation between progesterone concentration and the yellow-blue and red-green visual axes, with the genitalia as the region showing the highest correlation. The visual axis more apt to see the color variations was the yellow-blue in dichromats, and in trichromats were the red-green to face, yellow-blue to abdomen and both chromatic axes to genitalia. There was no difference in the signal detectability between trichromats and dichromats, but the perception pattern differed between the phenotypes, with a better signal detection by the dichromat phenotype 562 and the trichromat phenotype 543/562. During the behavioral experiments males presented longer gaze duration in periods of experimental manipulation and gaze duration was always longer towards cycling females compared to non-cycling females. Male locomotion during experimental manipulation was greater than in the control only during the periovulatory period of the female, indicating greater excitement. The behavior of cycling females was more active than the behavior of the non-cycling ones regarding locomotion and touching of the plexiglass division of the apparatus. Male gaze duration to cycling females increased with decreasing progesterone concentration, but none of the coloration parameters was correlated to the mate preference exhibited. This coloration signal can transmit information to animals of the group about fertility of female. Different from the intense red of the genitalia swellings of Old World primates, marmoset female genitalia became more bluish-green in the fertile period. Males chose fertile females and were able to visually identify the periovulatory period of females. Choice is related to progesterone concentration, but our results do not show relation between coloration and mate preference. Maybe some behavioral measure is associated with the choice

O desempenho terminológico dos descritores em Ciência da Informação do Vocabulário Controlado do SIBi/USP nos processos de indexação manual, automática e semi-automática

The terminological performance of the descriptors representing the Information Science domain in the SIBI/USP Controlled Vocabulary was evaluated in manual, automatic and semi-automatic indexing processes. It can be concluded that, in order to have a better performance (i.e., to adequately represent the content of the corpus), current Information Science descriptors of the SIBi/USP Controlled Vocabulary must be extended and put into context by means of terminological definitions so that information needs of users are fulfilled.

Identification of the Communicative Abilities of Brazilian Children With Cerebral Palsy in the Family Context

This article highlights the importance of the information obtained from the family in the implementation of the augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system. The objective was to investigate the communicative abilities of children with severe communication deficit through their parents' reports within the family routine. Eleven parents of children affiliated with a rehabilitation program in a public university in Brazil participated in this research. Per their parents' reports, the children demonstrated a variety of communication skills related to comprehension, expressive skills, and vocabulary. Parents further reported their children's daily communication routines including social partners, communication environment, and the materials the children enjoyed the most. These results emphasize the importance of family involvement in planning AAC so that it is functional within the family context.