ESS - BBB - Artigos
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Browsing ESS - BBB - Artigos by Issue Date
Now showing 1 - 10 of 98
Results Per Page
Sort Options
- Epidemiologia das fracturas do fémur em Portugal - Fracturas do colo do fémur versus fracturas de outras localizações não especificadas do fémurPublication . Alves, Sandra; Pina, Maria de Fátima; Barbosa, MárioUm aumento na ocorrência de fracturas atribuídas à osteoporose tem vindo a ser reportado em diversos países. As fracturas do colo do fémur são frequentemente estudadas, no entanto pouco se sabe de outras fracturas que também podem ser relacionadas com a osteoporose. O objectivo principal deste estudo é comparar a incidência das fracturas do colo do fémur atribuíveis à osteoporose com as que acontecem nas mesmas condições noutras localizações não especificadas do fémur. Foi utilizada a base de dados do Instituto de Gestão Informática e Financeira da Saúde, no período de 2000 a 2002. Do total de internamentos por fractura do fémur foram seleccionados os registos relativos a fracturas de baixa energia em indivíduos com mais de 50 anos, e analisadas separadamente as fracturas no colo do fémur (códigos 820 e derivados da Classificação Internacional de Doenças, 9ª Revisão, Modificação Clínica CID9) das fracturas de localizações não classificadas em outra parte, ou de localizações não especificadas do fémur (CID9-MC: 821 e derivados). Calcularam-se as letalidades e as taxas de incidência do período, por faixa etária e sexo, e efectuou-se uma análise das variáveis idade, dias e custo de internamento e destino após saída. Apenas 7,6% das fracturas do fémur seleccionadas foram codificadas como 821.x, todas as restantes foram codifica das como 820.x. Em ambos os grupos as fracturas são mais frequentes nas mulheres (acima de 75%) e apresentam um aumento exponencial com a idade. Os custos são mais elevados nas fracturas 820.x que também apresentam as taxas de letalidade mais elevadas.
- Hip fractures cluster in space: an epidemiological analysis in PortugalPublication . Pina, M. F. de; Alves, Sandra; Barbosa, M.; Barros, H.Using Portuguese hospital registers (2000–2002) we calculated age-standardized incidence rates of hip fractures. Spatial clusters of high incidence rates were found, with annual averages (per 100,000 inhabitants) varying from 154.4 to 572.2 and 77.3 to 231.5 for women and men, respectively. Geographic inequalities in the occurrence of hip fractures were also found.
- Atitudes face à estatística em diferentes grupos de profissionais de saúde em formaçãoPublication . Pimenta, Rui; Pereira, Ilídio; Costa, Elísio; Vieira, MargaridaUma grande parte das decisões que os profissionais de saúde tomam no seu dia-a-dia tem suporte estatístico num modelo que integre a prática clínica baseada na evidência. A atitude que estes profissionais têm face à estatística pode condicionar o exercício da competência estatística na sua prática clínica e o correcto desenvolvimento da intuição estatística. Neste trabalho, analisámos as diferentes componentes das atitudes face à estatística de estudantes e profissionais em formação, em distintas áreas de formação clínica e em distintos ciclos formativos, através das suas respostas ao Inquérito Atitudes Face à Estatística (SATS 28). Pretendemos, em primeiro lugar, avaliar a e analisar a relação entre as componentes das atitudes na nossa amostra. De seguida, recorremos a técnicas de visualização radial para verificar que componentes das atitudes permitem explicar melhor a variação das respostas dos estudantes. Por último, pretendemos comparar as atitudes face à estatística em diferentes grupos de profissionais em formação tomando em linha de conta a sua situação face à graduação. Recorremos a uma análise de variância a dois factores para estudar a interacção entre os factores área de formação e situação face à graduação e comparar os resultados obtidos nos diferentes grupos que decorrem desta análise. Os nossos resultados mostram que os estudantes das ciências da saúde têm, geralmente, uma atitude positiva face à estatística embora a dificuldade percebida seja mais relevante do que em estudos realizados anteriormente noutras áreas de formação.
- GACE - Um portal de apoio à consultadoria estatística em saúdePublication . Pimenta, Rui; Gomes, Paulo Veloso; Vieira, Margarida; Costa, ElísioA sociedade actual. baseada na tecnologia e na comunicação, obriga a uma reformulação dos conteúdos e da metodologia de ensino-aprendizagem da estatística e. simultaneamente. reforça a necessidade de uma formação mais profunda, uma vez que a capacidade estatística é uma competência nuclear para o exercício pleno da cidadania. Emerge, a~sim, uma mudança de rumo. da transmissão mais ou menos passiva de conhecimentos para a construção activa de uma cultura estatística. A Internct e as novas tecnologias de comunicação despoletaram um novo paradigma, modificando a tipologia das relações, entre os diversos actuantes no campo educativo. Os professores especialistas em estatística deverão assumir o papel de consultores e facilitadores das tarefas de investigação. Neste trabalho é apresentada a metodologia de construção de um portal colaborativo de apoio à interacção entre consultores e investigadores, no âmbito do desenvolvimento de projectos de investigação. contribuindo assim com uma ferramenta potenciadora da capacidade estatística e de comunicação entre consultores e investigadores.
- Spatial epidemiology: New approaches to old questionsPublication . Pina, Maria de Fátima de; Alves, Sandra; Ribeiro, Ana Isabel Correia; Olhero, Andreia CastroSpatial Epidemiology is used to describe, quantify and explain the geographical variations of diseases, to evaluate the association between the incidence of diseases and potential risk factors and to identify spatial clusters of diseases. This article goes through the main aspects of spatial epidemiology, starting with an explanation of the importance of mapping health data, an historical perspective of the development of the discipline, a description of spatial data types, some methods of spatial statistics, and the importance of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in the analysis of spatially-referenced data. Some applications of GIS regarding oral health are presented.
- Comparison of attitudes towards statistics in graduate and undergraduate health sciences' studentsPublication . Pimenta, Rui; Faria, Brigida Mónica; Pereira, Ilídio; Costa, Elísio; Vieira, MargaridaThe ultimate goal of statistical education is to provide an appropriate use of statistical thinking (Schau et al., 1995). This is particularly pertinent in the context of the health sciences since these professionals need to carry out their own investigations and make decisions under uncertainty integrating the best practices of evidence based medicine. Health professionals develop, at times, anxiety towards statistics due to their fear of mathematics. However, biostatistics courses can, nowadays, be conducted without a high level of calculus. Students’ attitudes might influence their learning of statistical concepts as much as their cognitive abilities. The influence of attitudes towards statistics on the development of statistical reasoning and thinking has been studied in different ways (Carmona, 2004; Blanco, 2008). However, the attitudes towards statistics in health sciences’ students are a new kind of research particularly pertinent due to an increasing number of students in this field. The difficulties in the use of statistics by different groups of professionals, particularly by health professionals, are well documented mainly when carrying out research. Health professionals need to promote their statistical abilities in order to be able to recognize when additional knowledge and skills are required, to obtain this additional statistical understanding or, better yet, to claim the consultation of a statistician. Improvement of positive attitudes towards statistics is a critical goal in statistics education. Positive attitudes contribute to a better use of statistical knowledge and to a better understanding of the variation inherent to data, enabling better decision-making under uncertainty when dealing with statistics. In this work, we evaluate, compare and present the first study which analyses the attitudes towards statistics in Portuguese health sciences students enrolling in postgraduate or undergraduate programs.
- Knowledge discovery and multimodal inputs for driving an intelligent wheelchairPublication . Faria, Brígida Mónica; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, NunoCerebral Palsy is defined as a group of permanent disorders in the development of movement and posture. The motor disorders in cerebral palsy are associated with deficits of perception, cognition, communication, and behaviour, which can affect autonomy and independence. The interface between the user and an intelligent wheelchair can be done with several input devices such as joysticks, microphones, and brain computer interfaces (BCI). BCI enables interaction between users and hardware systems through the recognition of brainwave activity. The current BCI systems have very low accuracy on the recognition of facial expressions and thoughts, making it difficult to use these devices to enable safe and robust commands of complex devices like an Intelligent Wheelchair. This paper presents an approach to expand the use of a brain computer interface for driving an intelligent wheelchair by patients suffering from cerebral palsy. The ability with the joystick, head movements, and voice inputs were tested, and the best possibility for driving the wheelchair is given to a specific user. Experiments were performed using 30 individuals suffering from IV and V degrees of cerebral palsy on the Gross Motor Function (GMF) measure. The results show that the pre-processing and variable selection methods are effective to improve the results of a commercial BCI product by 57%. With the developed system, it is also possible for users to perform a circuit in a simulated environment using just facial expressions and thoughts.
- Sistema inteligente para auxílio na seleção e execução de tarefas num jogo socialPublication . Reis, Luís Paulo; Neves, Romina; Abreu, Pedro; Faria, Brígida Mónica; Faria, Brigida MonicaNowadays social networks are used for various recreational purposes. It is believed that every day a user spend, on average, two hours playing this type of networkgames. Farmville is a social game available at one of the most successful social networks: Facebook.Farmville game allows each user to use a diverse set of actions in order to manage a virtual farm. However, this management quickly becomes a boring and time consuming process and often the user quitsplaying this game. In this context this project main objective was related with the development of an intelligent system able to effectively assist the player when playing Farmville. The system will help the user in most of his management tasks on the farm such as seeding and harvesting, receiving and sending gifts and managing the farm animals. The use of the implemented system ensures greater progress in the game, because there is a decrease in the time spent in performing the tasks enabling the user to focus on the strategies for advancingin the game.
- Empiric evaluation of a real-time robot dancing framework based on multi-modal eventsPublication . Oliveira, João Lobato; Reis, Luis Paulo; Faria, Brigida MonicaMusical robots have already inspired the creation of worldwide robotic dancing contests, as RoboCup-Junior's Dance, where school teams, formed by children aged eight to eighteen, put their robots in action, performing dance to music in a display that emphasizes creativity of costumes and movement. This paper describes and assesses a framework for robot dancing edutainment applications. The proposed robotics architecture enables the definition of choreographic compositions, which result on a conjunction of reactive dancing motions in real-time response to multi-modal inputs. These inputs are shaped by three rhythmic events (representing soft, medium, and strong musical note-onsets), different dance floor colors, and the awareness of the surrounding obstacles. This layout was applied to a LegoNXT humanoid robot, built with two Lego-NXT kits, and running on a hand-made dance stage.We report on an empirical evaluation over the overall robot dancing performance made to a group of students after a set of live demonstrations. This evaluation validated the framework's potential application in edutainment robotics and its ability to sustain the interest of the general audience by offering a reasonable compromise between musical-synchrony, animacy and dance performance’s variability.
- Evaluation of distinct input methods of an intelligent wheelchair in simulated and real environments: a performance and usability studyPublication . Faria, Brigida Monica; Vasconcelos, Sérgio; Reis, Luís Paulo; Lau, NunoThis paper focuses on evaluating the usability of an Intelligent Wheelchair (IW) in both real and simulated environments. The wheelchair is controlled at a high-level by a flexible multimodal interface, using voice commands, facial expressions, head movements and joystick as its main inputs. A Quasi-experimental design was applied including a deterministic sample with a questionnaire that enabled to apply the System Usability Scale. The subjects were divided in two independent samples: 46 individuals performing the experiment with an Intelligent Wheelchair in a simulated environment (28 using different commands in a sequential way and 18 with the liberty to choose the command); 12 individuals performing the experiment with a real IW. The main conclusion achieved by this study is that the usability of the Intelligent Wheelchair in a real environment is higher than in the simulated environment. However there were not statistical evidences to affirm that there are differences between the real and simulated wheelchairs in terms of safety and control. Also, most of users considered the multimodal way of driving the wheelchair very practical and satisfactory. Thus, it may be concluded that the multimodal interfaces enables very easy and safe control of the IW both in simulated and real environments.