WI-BIO: redes de monitoramento de pacientes em ambientes de automação hospitalar utilizando o padrão IEEE 802.11

The monitoring of patients performed in hospitals is usually done either in a manual or semiautomated way, where the members of the healthcare team must constantly visit the patients to ascertain the health condition in which they are. The adoption of this procedure, however, compromises the quality of the monitoring conducted since the shortage of physical and human resources in hospitals tends to overwhelm members of the healthcare team, preventing them from moving to patients with adequate frequency. Given this, many existing works in the literature specify alternatives aimed at improving this monitoring through the use of wireless networks. In these works, the network is only intended for data traffic generated by medical sensors and there is no possibility of it being allocated for the transmission of data from applications present in existing user stations in the hospital. However, in the case of hospital automation environments, this aspect is a negative point, considering that the data generated in such applications can be directly related to the patient monitoring conducted. Thus, this thesis defines Wi-Bio as a communication protocol aimed at the establishment of IEEE 802.11 networks for patient monitoring, capable of enabling the harmonious coexistence among the traffic generated by medical sensors and user stations. The formal specification and verification of Wi-Bio were made through the design and analysis of Petri net models. Its validation was performed through simulations with the Network Simulator 2 (NS2) tool. The simulations of NS2 were designed to portray a real patient monitoring environment corresponding to a floor of the nursing wards sector of the University Hospital Onofre Lopes (HUOL), located at Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. Moreover, in order to verify the feasibility of Wi-Bio in terms of wireless networks standards prevailing in the market, the testing scenario was also simulated under a perspective in which the network elements used the HCCA access mechanism described in the IEEE 802.11e amendment. The results confirmed the validity of the designed Petri nets and showed that Wi-Bio, in addition to presenting a superior performance compared to HCCA on most items analyzed, was also able to promote efficient integration between the data generated by medical sensors and user applications on the same wireless network

Mobilização de água e conservação da viabilidade de embriões de sementes recalcitrantes de ingá (Inga vera Willd. subsp. affinis (DC.) T. D. Pennington)

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)

Infância - memórias: cenários - personas

Infância is undoubtedly memory, high qual ity l iterature, reputable, as the story moves between f ict ion and reality. Personal and social history, wi th such a sense of reality, causing the reader to prof it f rom the honesty and the sinceri ty producing, in this work, remarkable results in a constancy of cl ippings, f rame -by-f rame. Memory and obl ivion are this work guidance. We aim to denounce the relat ionship between the chi ld and violence, and as it is a memorialist ic text , we see the importance of f ict ion for this type of narrat ive to be sustained. I aim thereby show the tone of this report humanizing memories, its deep and decisive meaning, through the memories concepts by Le Gof f , by Seligmann-Silva and by Ecléa Bosi. I t is also through the theories of Jeanne Marie Ganegbin that I just ify the concept of remembering and forget t ing, and also it is also according the concepts of Eliane Zagury that I give support to the importance of autobiography as a a mean of expressing the reported memor ies. Final ly, in Infância, there is no room for fantasy. The lyricism that overwhelms, throughout each chapter, commands the author's imaginat ion. The need to invent gives way to the need to test ify, to denounce. And this t ransit ion occurs gradually, slow as Gra c il ia n o s c h i ld li f e , d u e to such humiliat ion and submission

Mobile application as a tool for urban traffic data collection and generation to advanced traveler information systems using Wi-Fi networks available in urban centers

This paper presents an Advanced Traveler Information System (ATIS) developed on Android platform, which is open source and free. The developed application has as its main objective the free use of a Vehicle-to- Infrastructure (V2I) communication through the wireless network access points available in urban centers. In addition to providing the necessary information for an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to a central server, the application also receives the traffic data close to the vehicle. Once obtained this traffic information, the application displays them to the driver in a clear and efficient way, allowing the user to make decisions about his route in real time. The application was tested in a real environment and the results are presented in the article. In conclusion we present the benefits of this application. © 2012 IEEE.

O reaproveitamento de notícias no jornalismo impresso contemporâneo: o caso do Caderno Diplô, do Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil

Pós-graduação em Comunicação - FAAC

Comments on Stevenson Hardtke Associates Limited Port Study of Bridgetown Harbour, Barbados, WI

Includes bibliography

Ressonâncias da inclusão digital por Internet Wi-Fi, na configuração do estilo do lazer

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES)

Arcabouço para aprovisionamento de QoS e QoE em redes sem fio heterogêneas WiMAX/Wi-Fi com garantia de equidade entre vazões

Recentemente a sociedade está vivendo em meio a um aglomerado de dispositivos móveis com múltiplas interfaces sem fio que permitem que clientes móveis domésticos e corporativos solucionem problemas rotineiros no menor espaço de tempo e em diversas localizações. Por outro lado, a disponibilidade de diversas tecnologias de acesso sem fio como: Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity), WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access) e LTE (Long Term Evolution), proporcionam um cenário heterogêneo com diversas oportunidades de conectividade para o usuário de dispositivos com múltiplas interfaces. Alguns dos desafios atuais no contexto da concepção da então denominada NGN (Next Generation Networks) são o desenvolvimento de arcabouços e mecanismos que viabilizem tanto o suporte adequado à Qualidade de Serviço (QoS – Quality of Service) e à Qualidade de Experiência (QoE – Quality of Experience) para aplicações multimídia, quanto a garantia de equidade entre vazões de diferentes aplicações em ambiente heterogêneo. Esta dissertação propõe um arcabouço para o aprovisionamento de QoS e QoE em redes sem fio heterogêneas formada por redes WiMAX e Wi-Fi. Especificamente, nossa solução provê mapeamento estático de QoS entre as classes de serviços WiMAX e categorias de acesso Wi-Fi. Além disso, nossa proposta também combina funcionalidades de equidade entre vazões com a solução de mapeamento, a fim de alcançar um bom compromisso tanto para o operador da rede, quanto para o usuário, através de uma nova metodologia de coleta e calculo de vazão agregada e algoritmo de decisão de handover vertical. A avaliação quantitativa da proposta foi realizada através de modelos de simulação no ns-2 (Network Simulator). Os resultados de desempenho demonstram a eficiência da arquitetura em termos de métricas de QoS (vazão, vazão média e atraso) e QoE (PSRN - Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, SSIM - Structural Similarity Index e VQM - Video Quality Metric).

Estudo da tecnologia de acesso Wi-Fie suas aplicações em ambientes indoor e outdoor

Wireless communications is a feature that has become indispensable for many people in the whole world. Through this feature, communication process can become much more efficient, allowing people to access information much more quickly wherever they are. The constant evolution of communication technologies allows the development of new unthinkable applications and services. This new range of possibilities brings greater mobility and efficiency for final users and also helps service providers and carriers to improve the quality of services offered by them. This study presents the principles of wireless communication and the Wi-Fi technology as well as its most modern applications, covering from the basics of computer networks to the procedures of planning a wireless network, concepts of radio frequency, antennas, patterns, regulatory agencies, network equipment, protocols and network monitoring

Support infrastructures for multimedia services with guaranteed continuity and QoS

Advances in wireless networking and content delivery systems are enabling new challenging provisioning scenarios where a growing number of users access multimedia services, e.g., audio/video streaming, while moving among different points of attachment to the Internet, possibly with different connectivity technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular 3G. That calls for novel middlewares capable of dynamically personalizing service provisioning to the characteristics of client environments, in particular to discontinuities in wireless resource availability due to handoffs. This dissertation proposes a novel middleware solution, called MUM, that performs effective and context-aware handoff management to transparently avoid service interruptions during both horizontal and vertical handoffs. To achieve the goal, MUM exploits the full visibility of wireless connections available in client localities and their handoff implementations (handoff awareness), of service quality requirements and handoff-related quality degradations (QoS awareness), and of network topology and resources available in current/future localities (location awareness). The design and implementation of the all main MUM components along with extensive on the field trials of the realized middleware architecture confirmed the validity of the proposed full context-aware handoff management approach. In particular, the reported experimental results demonstrate that MUM can effectively maintain service continuity for a wide range of different multimedia services by exploiting handoff prediction mechanisms, adaptive buffering and pre-fetching techniques, and proactive re-addressing/re-binding.

Computational analyses on the structure-function relation in ion channels

Ion channels are protein molecules, embedded in the lipid bilayer of the cell membranes. They act as powerful sensing elements switching chemicalphysical stimuli into ion-fluxes. At a glance, ion channels are water-filled pores, which can open and close in response to different stimuli (gating), and one once open select the permeating ion species (selectivity). They play a crucial role in several physiological functions, like nerve transmission, muscular contraction, and secretion. Besides, ion channels can be used in technological applications for different purpose (sensing of organic molecules, DNA sequencing). As a result, there is remarkable interest in understanding the molecular determinants of the channel functioning. Nowadays, both the functional and the structural characteristics of ion channels can be experimentally solved. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the structure-function relation in ion channels, by computational techniques. Most of the analyses focused on the mechanisms of ion conduction, and the numerical methodologies to compute the channel conductance. The standard techniques for atomistic simulation of complex molecular systems (Molecular Dynamics) cannot be routinely used to calculate ion fluxes in membrane channels, because of the high computational resources needed. The main step forward of the PhD research activity was the development of a computational algorithm for the calculation of ion fluxes in protein channels. The algorithm - based on the electrodiffusion theory - is computational inexpensive, and was used for an extensive analysis on the molecular determinants of the channel conductance. The first record of ion-fluxes through a single protein channel dates back to 1976, and since then measuring the single channel conductance has become a standard experimental procedure. Chapter 1 introduces ion channels, and the experimental techniques used to measure the channel currents. The abundance of functional data (channel currents) does not match with an equal abundance of structural data. The bacterial potassium channel KcsA was the first selective ion channels to be experimentally solved (1998), and after KcsA the structures of four different potassium channels were revealed. These experimental data inspired a new era in ion channel modeling. Once the atomic structures of channels are known, it is possible to define mathematical models based on physical descriptions of the molecular systems. These physically based models can provide an atomic description of ion channel functioning, and predict the effect of structural changes. Chapter 2 introduces the computation methods used throughout the thesis to model ion channels functioning at the atomic level. In Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 the ion conduction through potassium channels is analyzed, by an approach based on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck electrodiffusion theory. In the electrodiffusion theory ion conduction is modeled by the drift-diffusion equations, thus describing the ion distributions by continuum functions. The numerical solver of the Poisson- Nernst-Planck equations was tested in the KcsA potassium channel (Chapter 3), and then used to analyze how the atomic structure of the intracellular vestibule of potassium channels affects the conductance (Chapter 4). As a major result, a correlation between the channel conductance and the potassium concentration in the intracellular vestibule emerged. The atomic structure of the channel modulates the potassium concentration in the vestibule, thus its conductance. This mechanism explains the phenotype of the BK potassium channels, a sub-family of potassium channels with high single channel conductance. The functional role of the intracellular vestibule is also the subject of Chapter 5, where the affinity of the potassium channels hEag1 (involved in tumour-cell proliferation) and hErg (important in the cardiac cycle) for several pharmaceutical drugs was compared. Both experimental measurements and molecular modeling were used in order to identify differences in the blocking mechanism of the two channels, which could be exploited in the synthesis of selective blockers. The experimental data pointed out the different role of residue mutations in the blockage of hEag1 and hErg, and the molecular modeling provided a possible explanation based on different binding sites in the intracellular vestibule. Modeling ion channels at the molecular levels relates the functioning of a channel to its atomic structure (Chapters 3-5), and can also be useful to predict the structure of ion channels (Chapter 6-7). In Chapter 6 the structure of the KcsA potassium channel depleted from potassium ions is analyzed by molecular dynamics simulations. Recently, a surprisingly high osmotic permeability of the KcsA channel was experimentally measured. All the available crystallographic structure of KcsA refers to a channel occupied by potassium ions. To conduct water molecules potassium ions must be expelled from KcsA. The structure of the potassium-depleted KcsA channel and the mechanism of water permeation are still unknown, and have been investigated by numerical simulations. Molecular dynamics of KcsA identified a possible atomic structure of the potassium-depleted KcsA channel, and a mechanism for water permeation. The depletion from potassium ions is an extreme situation for potassium channels, unlikely in physiological conditions. However, the simulation of such an extreme condition could help to identify the structural conformations, so the functional states, accessible to potassium ion channels. The last chapter of the thesis deals with the atomic structure of the !- Hemolysin channel. !-Hemolysin is the major determinant of the Staphylococcus Aureus toxicity, and is also the prototype channel for a possible usage in technological applications. The atomic structure of !- Hemolysin was revealed by X-Ray crystallography, but several experimental evidences suggest the presence of an alternative atomic structure. This alternative structure was predicted, combining experimental measurements of single channel currents and numerical simulations. This thesis is organized in two parts, in the first part an overview on ion channels and on the numerical methods adopted throughout the thesis is provided, while the second part describes the research projects tackled in the course of the PhD programme. The aim of the research activity was to relate the functional characteristics of ion channels to their atomic structure. In presenting the different research projects, the role of numerical simulations to analyze the structure-function relation in ion channels is highlighted.