Filipe Pereira

An Overview of Industrial Communication Networks

The authors of this paper are grateful to national funds by FCT—Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia in the scope of the project: PEst-OE/EEI/UI0319/2014.

Development of a Medical Care Terminal for Efficient Monitoring of Bedridden Subjects

This work is developed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and has as main objective the development of a mechatronic system that allows the care of bedridden patients with ongoing medical care handled by a single person. The developed Medical Care Terminal (MCT) improves autonomy in home care, safety, comfort, and hygiene of bedridden patients. The MCT has six biomedical sensors and four environmental sensors. Data acquisition and processing is performed using Arduino and LabVIEW platforms, respectively. The proposed solution has, as main feature, its adaptability to the patient needs. One of the MCT functionalities is the remote access to the patient data through the web. The caregiver may request help from a specialist who sends back information in real time to perform first aid assistance. This device has a flexible configuration allowing a fast and cheap reconfiguration according the specific needs of the patient. The proposed mechatronic system intends to meet the needs of bedridden patients improving their quality of life, health, safety, and comfort, while enabling the remote monitoring of the patients.

PAIR: the remote industrial automation trainer

This paper presents the project PAIR – Remote Industrial Automation Trainer. Its goal is to provide an environment where learners can improve their skills in Industrial Automation and practice their theoretical knowledge. In order to achieve this, PAIR will allow the users to explore automation concepts in some real scenes, as the control of an intelligent house or an industrial process. PAIR will also allow simulated virtual experiences associated to the real world scenarios.Copyright

Conceptual Design of a Mechatronic System for Supporting Basic Quality of Life of Bedridden Elderly People

Ambient Assisted Living is an important subject to be explored and developed, especially in developed countries, due to the increasing number of aged people. In this context the development of mechatronic support systems for bedridden elderly people (BEP) living in their homes is essential in order to support independence, autonomy and improve their quality of life. Some basic tasks as eating, taking a bath and/or hygiene cares become difficult to execute, regarding that often the main caregiver is the other element of the aged couple (husband or wife). This paper presents the conceptual design of a mechanical system especially devoted to assist the caregiver in the handling and repositioning of the BEP. Issues as reducing the number of caregivers, to only one, and reducing the systems handling complexity (because most of the time it will be used by an aged person) are considered. The expertise obtained from the visits to rehabilitation centers and hospitals, and from working meetings, are considered in the development of the proposed mechatronic system.

Industrial controlling process using the remote industrial automation trainer PAIR

This paper describes the development of the PAIR (Remote Industrial Automation Trainer) platform, an open access tool, to assist learning of industrial process automation. The students can practice their theoretical knowledge by exploring automation concepts based on some real world scenarios..An experiment is used to better explain PAIR design.

Ambient assisted living platform for remote monitoring of bedridden people

The aim of this paper is to present a platform for remote monitoring of bedridden people developed in the context of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). This platform, Medical Care Terminal (MCT), includes the measurement of biomedical data (body temperature, galvanic skin resistance, electrocardiogram and electromyogram, level of oxygen, body position and breathing) as well environmental data (level of alcohol in the air, carbon monoxide level in the air, brightness and temperature). It presents three main issues, namely: it has a user-friendly interface; it is simple to use by a single elderly person; it can be adapted to the needs of a specific patient (custom-made solution), as the system can be configured in function of the measurements required for that specific patient (modular configuration). Finally, it is a low cost solution, affordable for low budget markets.

Assessing Remote Physiological Signals Acquisition Experiments

The authors are grateful to the FEDER funds through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors - COMPETE and National Funds through FCT- Foundation for Science and Technology within the project FCOMP-01-0124- FEDER-022601 (ref. FCT PTDC/CPE-PEC/122329/2010) and to all the students for their voluntary cooperation and help in the evaluation of the remote lab experiments.

A Genetic and Evolutionary Programming Environment with Spatially Structured Populations and Built-In Parallelism

The recent development of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation field lead to a kaleidoscope of approaches to problem solving, which are based on a common background. These shared principles are used in order to develop a programming environment that enhances modularity, in terms of software design and implementation. The systems core encapsulates the main features of the Genetic and Evolutionary Algorithms, by identifying the entities at stake and implementing them as hierarchies of software modules. This architecture is enriched with the parallelization of the algorithms, based on spatially structured populations, following coarse-grained (Island Model) and fine-grained (Neighborhood Model) strategies. A distributed physical implementation, under the PVM environment, running in a local network, is described.