A review of patients with advanced cervical cancer presenting to palliative care services at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi

Background Cervical cancer is the commonest cancer affecting women in Malawi, which has the highest rate of this disease in the world. Most cases are diagnosed at an advanced stage. Aim To describe the symptom burden, palliative care interventions, and outcomes of cervical cancer patients who entered care at Tiyanjane Clinic in Blantyre, Malawi, between January and December 2012. Methods We reviewed the case files of 72 patients presenting to our hospital-based palliative care service over one year. Results The mean age was 49.5 years. Twenty-six patients (36%) were HIVpositive and the majority of these (n = 22; 85%) were on antiretroviral medication at presentation to palliative care. Pain (n = 66; 92%), vaginal discharge (n = 44; 61%), and unpleasant odour (n = 37; 51%) were commonly reported. Over a third of patients (n = 26; 36%) reported pain in two or more sites. Fourteen patients (19%) reported vaginal bleeding. Spousal breakdown (through widowhood or divorce) was noted in over half (n = 41; 57%) of all cases. Pain relief was provided to 69 (96%) of the patients (morphine to 40 patients; 56%). Common interventions provided included metronidazole tablets (used vaginally), sanitary items, and counselling. At the end of the study period, 18 patients (25%) were still under the care of palliative services. Conclusions Access to medications such as morphine, metronidazole and tranexamic acid can improve quality of life, even when radiotherapy is limited. Health care teams require necessary skills and training, including how to perform a comprehensive assessment, with an emphasis on the provision of psychosexual counselling, to assist with the complexity of symptoms occurring in this vulnerable group.

Time-Reversal Massive Multipath Effect and Bandwidth Heterogeneity

The proliferation of new mobile communication devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has led to an exponential growth in network traffic. The demand for supporting the fast-growing consumer data rates urges the wireless service providers and researchers to seek a new efficient radio access technology, which is the so-called 5G technology, beyond what current 4G LTE can provide. On the other hand, ubiquitous RFID tags, sensors, actuators, mobile phones and etc. cut across many areas of modern-day living, which offers the ability to measure, infer and understand the environmental indicators. The proliferation of these devices creates the term of the Internet of Things (IoT). For the researchers and engineers in the field of wireless communication, the exploration of new effective techniques to support 5G communication and the IoT becomes an urgent task, which not only leads to fruitful research but also enhance the quality of our everyday life. Massive MIMO, which has shown the great potential in improving the achievable rate with a very large number of antennas, has become a popular candidate. However, the requirement of deploying a large number of antennas at the base station may not be feasible in indoor scenarios. Does there exist a good alternative that can achieve similar system performance to massive MIMO for indoor environment? In this dissertation, we address this question by proposing the time-reversal technique as a counterpart of massive MIMO in indoor scenario with the massive multipath effect. It is well known that radio signals will experience many multipaths due to the reflection from various scatters, especially in indoor environments. The traditional TR waveform is able to create a focusing effect at the intended receiver with very low transmitter complexity in a severe multipath channel. TR's focusing effect is in essence a spatial-temporal resonance effect that brings all the multipaths to arrive at a particular location at a specific moment. We show that by using time-reversal signal processing, with a sufficiently large bandwidth, one can harvest the massive multipaths naturally existing in a rich-scattering environment to form a large number of virtual antennas and achieve the desired massive multipath effect with a single antenna. Further, we explore the optimal bandwidth for TR system to achieve maximal spectral efficiency. Through evaluating the spectral efficiency, the optimal bandwidth for TR system is found determined by the system parameters, e.g., the number of users and backoff factor, instead of the waveform types. Moreover, we investigate the tradeoff between complexity and performance through establishing a generalized relationship between the system performance and waveform quantization in a practical communication system. It is shown that a 4-bit quantized waveforms can be used to achieve the similar bit-error-rate compared to the TR system with perfect precision waveforms. Besides 5G technology, Internet of Things (IoT) is another terminology that recently attracts more and more attention from both academia and industry. In the second part of this dissertation, the heterogeneity issue within the IoT is explored. One of the significant heterogeneity considering the massive amount of devices in the IoT is the device heterogeneity, i.e., the heterogeneous bandwidths and associated radio-frequency (RF) components. The traditional middleware techniques result in the fragmentation of the whole network, hampering the objects interoperability and slowing down the development of a unified reference model for the IoT. We propose a novel TR-based heterogeneous system, which can address the bandwidth heterogeneity and maintain the benefit of TR at the same time. The increase of complexity in the proposed system lies in the digital processing at the access point (AP), instead of at the devices' ends, which can be easily handled with more powerful digital signal processor (DSP). Meanwhile, the complexity of the terminal devices stays low and therefore satisfies the low-complexity and scalability requirement of the IoT. Since there is no middleware in the proposed scheme and the additional physical layer complexity concentrates on the AP side, the proposed heterogeneous TR system better satisfies the low-complexity and energy-efficiency requirement for the terminal devices (TDs) compared with the middleware approach.

Desenvolvimento e validação de metodologias para quantificação de 3,4 metilenodioximetanfetamina (MDMA) em comprimidos de ecstasy por cromatografia gasosa e ressonância magnética nuclear

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Química, 2016.

Sistema de aquisição para monitorização da produção de energia em sistemas de energia renovável

Dissertação de Mestrado, Engenharia Eléctrica e Electrónica, Especialização em Tecnologias de Informação e Telecomunicações, Instituto Superior de Engenharia, Universidade do Algarve, 2014

Interface em smartphone para supervisão de um sistema de controlo de uma instalação solar térmica

Dissertação de Mestrado, Engenharia Elétrica e Eletrónica, Especialização em Sistemas de Energia e Controlo, Instituto Superior de Engenharia, Universidade do Algarve, 2014

Corpos tatuados : experiências sensíveis em realidade aumentada móvel

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Artes, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Artes, 2015.

A Organização e os Dispositivos Móveis

O uso de dispositivos móveis está a ganhar cada vez mais espaço dentro das organizações. O aumento do consumo de material informático por parte dos consumidores está a levar a que os mesmos comecem a tentar utilizar os seus dispositivos móveis1 Notebooks, Tablets e Smartphones no interior das organizações. Este tipo de comportamento, levou ao aparecimento de uma nova tendência – o Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), a utilização de dispositivos móveis para fins laborais, levanta várias e sérias questões de segurança aos departamentos de TI das organizações, fazendo com que as organizações necessitem de definir novas políticas de segurança para que a sua informação e os seus dados se mantenham seguros. O trabalho adiante desenvolvido pretende mostrar de que forma as organizações veem esta mudança de paradigma, em que os próprios colaboradores utilizam os seus dispositivos móveis como ferramenta de trabalho na organização. Por outro lado analisar os modelos de segurança que se podem associar ao BYOD e aos dispositivos móveis para permitir uma maior segurança dos dados e informação que circula entre a organização e o dispositivo móvel.

Liquid chromatographic-mass spectrometric method for determination of drug content uniformity of two commonly used dermatology medications in a split-tablet dosage form

Purpose: To develop and validate a simple, efficient and reliable Liquid chromatographic-mass spectrometric (LC-MS/MS) method for the quantitative determination of two dermatological drugs, Lamisil® (terbinafine) and Proscar® (finasteride), in split tablet dosage form. Methods: Thirty tablets each of the 2 studied medications were randomly selected. Tablets were weighed and divided into 3 groups. Ten tablets of each drug were kept intact, another group of 10 tablets were manually split into halves using a tablet cutter and weighed with an analytical balance; a third group were split into quarters and weighed. All intact and split tablets were individually dissolved in a water: methanol mixture (4:1), sonicated, filtered and further diluted with mobile phase. Optimal chromatographic separation and mass spectrometric detection were achieved using an Agilent 1200 HPLC system coupled with an Agilent 6410 triple quadrupole mass spectrometer. Analytes were eluted through an Agilent eclipse plus C8 analytical column (150 mm × 4.6 mm, 5 μm) with a mobile phase composed of solvent A (water) containing 0.1% formic acid and 5mM ammonium formate pH 7.5, and solvent B (acetonitrile mixed with water in a ratio A:B 55:45) at a flow rate of 0.8 mL min-1 with a total run time of 12 min. Mass spectrometric detection was carried out using positive ionization mode with analyte quantitation monitored by multiple reaction monitoring (MRM) mode. Results: The proposed analytical method proved to be specific, robust and adequately sensitive. The results showed a good linear fit over the concentration range of 20 - 100 ng mL-1 for both analytes, with a correlation coefficient (r2) ≥ 0.999 and 0.998 for finasteride and terbinafine, respectively. Following tablet splitting, the drug content of the split tablets fell outside of the proxy USP specification for at least 14 halves (70 %) and 34 quarters (85 %) of FIN, as well as 16 halves (80 %) and 37 quarters (92.5 %) of TBN. Mean weight loss, after splitting, was 0.58 and 2.22 % for FIN half- and quarter tablets, respectively, and 3.96 and 4.09 % for TBN half- and quarter tablets,respectively. Conclusion: The proposed LC-MS/MS method has successfully been used to provide precise drug content uniformity of split tablets of FIN and TBN. Unequal distribution of the drug on the split tablets is indicated by the high standard deviation beyond the accepted value. Hence, it is recommended not to split non-scored tablets especially, for those medications with significant toxicity

Therapeutic effects of ciprofloxacin/bushenhuazhuo combination on chronic prostatitis

Purpose: To evaluate the clinical effect of bushenhuazhuo (a Chinese traditional medicine) in combination with ciprofloxacin (an orthodox medicine) in chronic prostatitis (CP) therapy. Methods: A total of 160 patients who suffered from CP and received treatment in the People’s Hospital of Zhengzhou between April 2012 and June 2014 were selected and divided randomly into treatment and control groups, with 80 patients in each group. Control group was given 0.25 g ciprofloxacin hydrochloride tablets twice a day for 4 weeks. In addition to ciprofloxacin administration, patients in the treatment group also received a dose of bushenhuazhuo preparation twice daily for 4 weeks. Clinical outcomes, quality of life as well as lecithin body and white blood cell (WBC) count in expressed prostatic secretions (EPS-WBC) were evaluated. Results: Cure rates in the treatment and control groups were 90 and 72.50 %, respectively; this difference was significant (p < 0.05). Scores for National Institutes of Health Chronic Prostatitis Symptom Index (NIH-CPSI), WBC, and lecithin bodies in the treatment group (8.20 ± 2.20 points, 4.50 ± 1.20 points, and 28.10 ± 2.10 points, respectively) were higher (p < 0.05) than for the control group (12.20 ± 2.20, 6.30 ± 2.20, and 23.30 ± 2.90 points, respectively). The levels of interferon (IFN)-γ and tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α in the treatment group (26.20 ± 3.30 and 33.80 ± 5.40 mg/L, respectively) were lower than those in the control group (37.70 ± 3.90 and 48.40 ± 3.70 mg/L, respectively), whereas the level of interleukin (IL)-10 in the treatment group (292.60 ± 23.70 mg/L) was higher (p < 0.05) than that in control group (235.80 ± 25.90 mg/L). Conclusion: Ciprofloxacin combined with the Chinese traditional medicine, bushenhuazhuo preparation, demonstrates a marked therapeutic effect in CP. Its mechanism of action may be related to decreased levels of IFN-γ and TNF-α and increased IL-10.

El cuento y la novela digital: estructura del texto e interactivdad

Resumen Desde hace algunas décadas la computadora, las tablets, los teléfonos inteligentes, los libros electrónicos, el internet y la conectividad irrumpieron en nuestras casas, cambiando de manera casi radical nuestra manera de aprehender el mundo. Es cierto que hoy en día, el fenómeno multimedia y su impacto sobre la sociedad fueron analizados desde diferentes perspectivas,tratando establecer los cambios en el comportamiento y hábitos que lo digital acarrea. Evidentemente, el mundo literario, como todos los ámbitos de la cultural, ha sido afectado por este fenómeno tecnológico y sus innovaciones. Varios autores y críticos literarios han analizado el tema desde varias ópticas, tales como Christian Vanderdrope y Roger Chartier quienes han estudiado los cambios que van desde las transformaciones físicas del libro hasta variaciones en la estructura del texto;Clément y Landow estudian, también la estructura misma de ciertos textos narrativos contemporáneos; escritores como Andrés Neuman, Leonardo Valencia, Vicente Mora o Fernando Escobar, entre otros,crean y reflexionan sobre el uso que ellos mismos hacen de la herramienta digital a través de susblogs. Estas nuevas textualidades es lo que nos proponemos estudiar en este trabajo, describiendo el impacto de su evolución y mutación artística, básicamente centrándonos en la estructura del texto ya sea del cuento o la novela; así como establecer la novedosa vinculación que estos textos mantiene con sus lectores.

Trajetória profissional de professoras do ensino médio : sentidos e usos de tecnologias digitais na sala de aula

Tese (doutorado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Psicologia, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Processos de Desenvolvimento Humano e Saúde, 2016.

MULTI-WAVELENGTH SPECKLE REDUCTION FOR LASER PICO-PROJECTORS USING DIFFRACTIVE OPTICS

Personal electronic devices, such as cell phones and tablets, continue to decrease in size while the number of features and add-ons keep increasing. One particular feature of great interest is an integrated projector system. Laser pico-projectors have been considered, but the technology has not been developed enough to warrant integration. With new advancements in diode technology and MEMS devices, laser-based projection is currently being advanced for pico-projectors. A primary problem encountered when using a pico-projector is coherent interference known as speckle. Laser speckle can lead to eye irritation and headaches after prolonged viewing. Diffractive optical elements known as diffusers have been examined as a means to lower speckle contrast. Diffusers are often rotated to achieve temporal averaging of the spatial phase pattern provided by diffuser surface. While diffusers are unable to completely eliminate speckle, they can be utilized to decrease the resultant contrast to provide a more visually acceptable image. This dissertation measures the reduction in speckle contrast achievable through the use of diffractive diffusers. A theoretical Fourier optics model is used to provide the diffuser’s stationary and in-motion performance in terms of the resultant contrast level. Contrast measurements of two diffractive diffusers are calculated theoretically and compared with experimental results. In addition, a novel binary diffuser design based on Hadamard matrices will be presented. Using two static in-line Hadamard diffusers eliminates the need for rotation or vibration of the diffuser for temporal averaging. Two Hadamard diffusers were fabricated and contrast values were subsequently measured, showing good agreement with theory and simulated values. Monochromatic speckle contrast values of 0.40 were achieved using the Hadamard diffusers. Finally, color laser projection devices require the use of red, green, and blue laser sources; therefore, using a monochromatic diffractive diffuser may not optimal for color speckle contrast reduction. A simulation of the Hadamard diffusers is conducted to determine the optimum spacing between the two diffusers for polychromatic speckle reduction. Experimental measured results are presented using the optimal spacing of Hadamard diffusers for RGB color speckle reduction, showing 60% reduction in contrast.

Aplicación de videojuegos educativos teatrales en dispositivos móviles y fijos

En un mundo dominado por las nuevas tecnologías, donde en cada casa podemos encontrar más dispositivos tecnológicos que personas, seguimos teniendo un sistema educativo basado en libros de texto, cuaderno y bolígrafo. Esto, combinado con una generación de estudiantes considerados como nativos digitales (Prensky, 2010), está haciendo que los resultados académicos sean cada vez peores, aumentando el fracaso escolar (Fernández Pérez, 1986). Sin embargo, dada la aparición de los llamados videojuegos educativos, o "serious games", y la digitalización de las aulas, se ha demostrado que aprender jugando no sólo es más divertido, sino que además es más efectivo (Wong et al., 2007). Pero, cuando un centro educativo decide invertir dinero en traer nuevas tecnologías a las aulas, surge la siguiente pregunta: ¿en qué tipo de dispositivo debo invertir? Hasta la aparición de las tablets, esta pregunta tenía una clara respuesta, ordenadores. Pero con la llegada de éstas, la respuesta no está tan clara. ¿Qué dispositivo funciona mejor en las aulas? Otro ámbito que pierde adeptos entre los más jóvenes con la llegada de tanta tecnología a los hogares, es el mundo del teatro. Cada vez son menos los jóvenes interesados en acudir al teatro, convirtiendo a éste en un espectáculo de minorías. Una vez más los videojuegos educativos pueden ser una solución, como se demuestra en la tesis doctoral de Borja Manero (Manero, Torrente, Serrano, Martínez-Ortiz, & Fernández-Manjón, 2015). Esto llamó la atención del Compañía Nacional de Teatro Clásico (CNTC), queriendo realizar más videojuegos educativos que ayuden a incrementar el interés de los más jóvenes por el teatro. Por lo tanto, tenemos dos retos por delante: el principal es encontrar el mejor dispositivo para aplicar estos videojuegos educativos. Esto nos lleva a un segundo objetivo. Desarrollar el videojuego que servirá como herramienta para el desarrollo del experimento. Desarrollamos un videojuego educativo, basado en la obra de teatro “La Cortesía de España”, representada por la CNTC. Se realizaron varios procesos de adaptación para transformar una obra de teatro clásico en un videojuego divertido y útil para la investigación. Utilizando este videojuego como herramienta educativa, realizamos un experimento en el colegio de la Comunidad de Madrid Benito Pérez Galdós (Móstoles), proporcionándonos más de 150 alumnos, de entre 9 y 11 años, para participar en el mismo. Este experimento tiene como fin demostrar qué dispositivo funciona mejor con esta generación: los dispositivos móviles (tablets) o dispositivos fijos (ordenadores). Aunque previamente los investigadores sospechaban que el resultado del experimento sería claramente a favor de las tablets, por su cercanía con los jóvenes a los que estaba dirigido, los resultados arrojan otra conclusión completamente distinta. Efectivamente los más jóvenes utilizan más las tablets que los ordenadores para jugar, pero, analizados los resultados, son los ordenadores los que mejor funcionan como herramienta de aprendizaje.

Prototype and proof of concept for a display system in retail stores

Selling devices on retail stores comes with the big challenge of grabbing the customer’s attention. Nowadays people have a lot of offers at their disposal and new marketing techniques must emerge to differentiate the products. When it comes to smartphones and tablets, those devices can make the difference by themselves, if we use their computing power and capabilities to create something unique and interactive. With that in mind, three prototypes were developed during an internship: a face recognition based Customer Detection, a face tracking solution with an Avatar and interactive cross-app Guides. All three revealed to have potential to be differentiating solutions in a retail store, not only raising the chance of a customer taking notice of the device but also of interacting with them to learn more about their features. The results were meant to be only proof of concepts and therefore were not tested in the real world.