Pressure injuries (LPP) are one of the biggest adverse events foundin health services and consist of damage to the body tissues ofbedridden patients, resulting from prolonged pressure on the skin.This situation impacts on the quality of life of people who developthe condition, causing physical and emotional damage to the bedridden,in addition to increasing the time and costs of hospitalization.Based on this problem, software was developed that shows thepoints of greatest pressure between the body of a bedridden patientand the bed in which he is. This software receives information fromhardware, under development, built specifically for this project.The points of greatest pressure are made available on the screenof a monitoring application, in an organized and intuitive manner.For each person, a pressure map image is generated with the valuesread and decubitus change times are suggested through alarms. Inaddition, this image can be analyzed by a health professional whocan take steps to relieve pressure points and prevent the appearanceof LPP. As a result, in tests carried out during the research, the systembuilt showed the information successfully and the objectiveswere achieved.

There are different types of adaptive beamformers for medical ultrasound imaging using the plane waves technique. Two of these methods are relatively new, such as the Minimum Variance (MV) with Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (MVGSC) beamforming and Eigenspace-base with Generalized Sidelobe Canceller (EBGSC) beamforming. These two methods already show improvement in the ultrasound image when compared with Delay-and-Sum (DAS) beamforming and MV beamforming. In order to develop MVGSC and EBGSC techniques in this work, it was applied, to the weighted signal, the adaptive Frost postfilter. To evaluate the proposed method, two phantom data from the platform Plane-Wave Imaging Challenge in Medical Ultrasound (PICMUS) were used. One phantom with point scatterers and the other with cysts. To evaluate the performance of the beamforming with Frost postfilter we have used the Contrast Ratio (CR), the Contrast-to-Noise Ratio (CNR) and the geometric distortion ratio (GDR) of Full Width at Half Maximum (FWHM) axial and lateral. The CR and CNR were calculated in three cysts with different depths. The MVGSC-Frost and EBGSC-Frost have shown better performance than DAS, MV, MVGSC and EBGSC beamformers, but the proposed methods have a worse resolution than the others beamformers. However, it offers a much better performance in contrast, showing its potential for medical ultrasound imaging.

Aulas expositivas são muitas vezes consideradas cansativas, enquanto que a resolução de exercícios com grande esforço matemático pode desvincular o resultado (mesmo que correto) de seu significado físico. Essa situação se aplica, por exemplo, no estudo dos filtros digitais. O presente trabalho demonstra a viabilidade do desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta computacional, dentro do ambiente acadêmico, para estudo desse importante fundamento da Eletrônica. Com a aplicação do software criado nas aulas, espera-se aumentar o interesse dos alunos, permitindo a simulação, com uma interface gráfica, de muitos exercícios e situações com pouco consumo do escasso tempo de aula.

The current reality of the energy market requires generation, control, distribution and consumption to become more efficient. Recent arrangements with electric energy stored in accumulators appear as strategic tools in the environment where the cost of energy supplied by the concessionaires and permission holders has accumulated successive increases, indirectly enabling the control and management of applications of micro or local minigeneration, from renewable sources in general. Systems with energy storage (e.g. batteries) and local demand management (many consumer units) achieve great efficiency by allowing the optimized consumption of the available energy, both by the local power grid and by the accumulated grid. Other advantages are presented for the distributors, allowing the relief of the electricity network, remunerating the investment in reduced intervals of time. Consideration should be given to the possibility of local autonomy, even if partially, by providing energy from the storage to the local loads in eventual failures in the supply of energy by the distribution network or at times where supply has a higher cost.

Controlling the demand of electrical energy by an electronic microcontroller with IoT (Internet of Things) capabilities on local energy storage brings important management tools to the Smart Grid environment. A system that seeks to make the best possible use of the energy stored by intermittent microgeneration and with availability of use by the local power grid creates a great environment to achieve savings with some autonomy. In addition, it allows integrate with the batteries of electric vehicles (EVs). However, the possibilities for concessionaires or energy traders are even greater: they may alleviate overloaded nodes in distribution grids, keep batteries charged during storms that could compromise the energy supply, and balance consumers with different power generation capacities in the network, among others. The present proposition intends to demonstrate one of the possible solutions for the control of energy demand based on a IoT microcontroller managed local accumulation, with parameters shared on a data server.

In music, it is important that the instruments sound harmonic and reproduce sound in a repeatable and universal manner.Humans have difficulty in distinguishing very similar sounds, therefore, a device capable of doing so is very useful.The tool used for this is called an instrument tuner.There is a huge variety of such devices in the market, usually capable of detecting sound and frequency from specific instruments, due to the way sound is produced.Musicians that play different instruments must own multiple tuners to suffice their needs.This article details the development of an optimized pitch detection device, running on an Android smartphone, capable of detecting and processing sound signals emitted by different kinds of instruments, with frequencies ranging from 27.5 Hz to 4186 Hz in a non-expensive manner.

Ultrasonic image reconstruction using inverse problems has recently appeared as an alternative to enhance ultrasound imaging over beamforming methods. This approach depends on the accuracy of the acquisition model used to represent transducers, reflectivity, and medium physics. Iterative methods, well known in general sparse signal reconstruction, are also suited for imaging. In this paper, a discrete acquisition model is assessed by solving a linear system of equations by an ℓ 1 -regularized least-squares minimization, where the solution sparsity may be adjusted as desired. The paper surveys 11 variants of four well-known algorithms for sparse reconstruction, and assesses their optimization parameters with the goal of finding the best approach for iterative ultrasound imaging. The strategy for the model evaluation consists of using two distinct datasets. We first generate data from a synthetic phantom that mimics real targets inside a professional ultrasound phantom device. This dataset is contaminated with Gaussian noise with an estimated SNR, and all methods are assessed by their resulting images and performances. The model and methods are then assessed with real data collected by a research ultrasound platform when scanning the same phantom device, and results are compared with beamforming. A distinct real dataset is finally used to further validate the proposed modeling. Although high computational effort is required by iterative methods, results show that the discrete model may lead to images closer to ground-truth than traditional beamforming. However, computing capabilities of current platforms need to evolve before frame rates currently delivered by ultrasound equipments are achievable.

This paper reports the use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to solve the assembly line balancing problem in a real-world application: a car assembly facility. The problem is modeled and a standard GA is applied. The line layout solution found by GA reduces by 28.5% the total assembly time of the current line layout, which implies in a significant reduction of costs. This result suggests that the use of GAs in real-world industrial problems can be very promising.