BackgroundThe chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a worldwide critical problem, especially in developing countries. CKD patients usually begin their treatment in advanced stages, which requires dialysis and kidney transplantation, and consequently, affects mortality rates. This issue is faced by a mobile health (mHealth) application (app) that aims to assist the early diagnosis and self-monitoring of the disease progression.MethodsA user-centered design (UCD) approach involving health professionals (nurse and nephrologists) and target users guided the development process of the app between 2012 and 2016. In-depth interviews and prototyping were conducted along with healthcare professionals throughout the requirements elicitation process. Elicited requirements were translated into a native mHealth app targeting the Android platform. Afterward, the Cohen’s Kappa coefficient statistics was applied to evaluate the agreement between the app and three nephrologists who analyzed test results collected from 60 medical records. Finally, eight users tested the app and were interviewed about usability and user perceptions.ResultsA mHealth app was designed to assist the CKD early diagnosis and self-monitoring considering quality attributes such as safety, effectiveness, and usability. A global Kappa value of 0.7119 showed a substantial degree of agreement between the app and three nephrologists. Results of face-to-face interviews with target users indicated a good user satisfaction. However, the task of CKD self-monitoring proved difficult because most of the users did not fully understand the meaning of specific biomarkers (e.g., creatinine).ConclusionThe UCD approach provided mechanisms to develop the app based on the real needs of users. Even with no perfect Kappa degree of agreement, results are satisfactory because it aims to refer patients to nephrologists in early stages, where they may confirm the CKD diagnosis.

Over the last years, the issue of reducing energy consumption in embedded system applications has received considerable attention from the scientific community, since responsiveness and low energy consumption are often conflicting requirements. In this context, this dissertation proposes a methodology applied in early design phases for supporting design decisions on energy consumption and performance of embedded applications. In addition, this work proposes temporized discrete event models that have been evaluated through a stochastic simulation approach to represent different system scenarios in an easier way. For each scenario, it is important to decide the maximum number of simulations and the duration of each simulation, where both may impact the performance estimates. Such approach also considers an intermediate model which represents the system behavioral description and, through these models, the scenarios are analyzed. The intermediate model is based on timed Colored Petri Net, a formal behavioral model that not only allows the software execution analysis, but it is also supported by a set of well established methods for property verifications. In this context, a software, named ALUPAS, for estimating energy consumption and execution time of embedded systems is presented. Lastly, a real-world case study as well as customized examples are presented, showing the applicability of this work in which non-specialized users do not need to interact directly with the Petri net formalism.

Virtual Worlds (VW), such as Massive Multiplayer Online Social Games, have been gaining increasing attention in the last few years, mainly due to the new way users interact with them. However, little effort has been devoted to understand their traffic profile and the implications to the traffic management area. With the current growing rate of VWs' usage, their traffic demand could eventually impose a significant burden on the operation of a typical Internet Service Provider (ISP) network. In this paper, we seek to understand the traffic behavior of an increasingly popular VW application, namely Second Life (SL), from both the connection and network level perspectives. We also show results of a traffic analysis of a SL client, when an avatar performs different actions in the VW, at different places and under different network conditions. Our results show that SL makes intensive use of network resources (mostly bandwidth), since the capacity needed for having a full SL experience (listening to live music) may reach 500 kbps. We then extend the traffic analysis work on SL by providing analytical models for its traffic profile. We aim at helping the network management and planning area to estimate the impact of an intense use of such VW on access links or core networks. Such synthetic models are also useful to the networking research community for the use in network simulations.

Linalool is a monoterpene alcohol and constituent of several Brazilian aromatic medicinal plants, popularly used against hypertension. Cardiovascular effects induced by linalool were evaluated. In normotensive rats, ()-linalool [1, 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg body weight (BW); intravenous (i.v.)]-induced hypotension was associated with tachycardia, which was attenuated by atropine (2 mg/kg BW) and N G -nitro-L-arginine methyl ester (20 mg/kg BW), but was not modifi ed after indomethacin (5 mg/kg BW) administration. In hypertensive rats, linalool [200 mg/kg BW; oral (v.o.)] reduced blood pressure without changing the heart rate. In intact rings of rat mesenteric artery precontracted with 10 μM phenylephrine, linalool (from 6.4 · 10 -6 to 6.4 · 10 -3 M) induced relaxations in a concentration-dependent manner [E max = (115  13)%] that were not changed after atropine administration [E max = (105  2)%], and were not different from those obtained in endothelium-denuded rings precontracted with phenylephrine [E max = (108  7)%] or 80 mM KCl [E max = (113  7)%] or tetraethylammonium incubation [E max = (105  12)%]. Linalool (1.9 · 10 -3 M) antagonized the contractions induced by CaCl 2 (3 · 10 -6 -10 -2 M) (maximal inhibition, 81%). Furthermore, linalool inhibited the contractions induced by 10 μM phenylephrine or 20 mM caffeine. In conclusion, these results demonstrate that linalool reduces blood pressure probably due to a direct effect on the vascular smooth muscle leading to vasodilation.

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