It is commonly accepted that the educational environment has been undergoing considerable change due to the use of the Information and Communication tools. But learning depends upon actions such as experimenting, visualizing and demonstrating through which the learner succeeds in constructing his own knowledge. Although it is not easy to achieve these actions through current ICT supported learning approaches, Role Playing Games (RPG) may well develop such capacities. The creation of an interactive computer game with RPG characteristics, about the 500th anniversary of the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, is invested with compelling educational/pedagogical implications, aiming clearly at teaching history and social relations through playing. Players interpret different characters in different settings/scenarios, experiencing adventures, meeting challenges and trying to reach multiple and simultaneous goals in the areas of education, entertainment and social integration along the first 150 years of the history of Funchal. Through this process they will live and understand all the social and historical factors of that epoch.
The SEAGULL project aims at the development of intelligent systems to support maritime situation awareness based on unmanned aerial vehicles. It proposes to create an intelligent maritime surveillance system by equipping unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with different types of optical sensors. Optical sensors such as cameras (visible, infrared, multi and hyper spectral) can contribute significantly to the generation of situational awareness of maritime events such as (i) detection and georeferencing of oil spills or hazardous and noxious substances; (ii) tracking systems (e.g. vessels, shipwrecked, lifeboat, debris, etc.); (iii) recognizing behavioral patterns (e.g. vessels rendezvous, high-speed vessels, atypical patterns of navigation, etc.); and (iv) monitoring parameters and indicators of good environmental status. On-board transponders will be used for collision detection and avoidance mechanism (sense and avoid). This paper describes the core of the research and development work done during the first 2 years of the project with particular emphasis on the following topics: system architecture, automatic detection of sea vessels by vision sensors and custom designed computer vision algorithms; and a sense and avoid system developed in the theoretical framework of zero-sum differential games.
Unmanned air systems are becoming ever more important in modern societies but raise a number of unresolved problems. There are legal issues with the operation of these vehicles in nonsegregated airspace, and a pressing requirement to solve these issues is the development and testing of reliable and safe mechanisms to avoid collision in flight. In this article, we describe a sense and avoid subsystem developed for a maritime patrol unmanned air system. The article starts with a description of the unmanned air system, that was developed specifically for maritime patrol operations, and proceeds with a discussion of possible ways to guarantee that the unmanned air system does not collide with other flying objects. In the system developed, the position of the unmanned air system is obtained by the global positioning system and that of other flying objects is reported via a data link with a ground control station. This assumes that the detection of those flying objects is done by a radar in the ground or by self-reporting via a traffic monitoring system (such as automatic identification system). The algorithm developed is based on game theory. The approach is to handle both the procedures, threat detection phase and collision avoidance maneuver, in a unified fashion, where the optimal command for each possible relative attitude of the obstacle is computed off-line, therefore requiring low processing power for real-time operation. This work was done under the research project named SEAGULL that aims to improve maritime situational awareness using fleets of unmanned air system, where collision avoidance becomes a major concern.
The aim of this review was to evaluate whether thermal imaging may constitute a reliable assessment method of musculoskeletal and temporomandibular disorders (TMD/MSD). A systematic review was conducted in the Pubmed, Scopus, Cochrane library, Web of Science, and Lilacs databases. The search terms were “musculoskeletal disorders,”“temporomandibular disorders,”“infrared thermography,”“thermography,” and “infrared imaging.” The inclusion criteria were: studies published between January 1985 and January 2021, performed in humans, with sample size equal or greater than 20 patients, written in English, Portuguese, French and/or Spanish, and full text available. The exclusion criteria were: systematic reviews, case studies, and/or studies focused on pathologies beyond the review’s domain. The risk of bias was evaluated using CASP 2018. A total of 2032 articles were retrieved. Of these, 25 studies met the inclusion criteria and were included to withdraw the following information: title, type of study, first author and year of publication, objective, number of participants, comparisons, and principal conclusions. No RCT were found. Despite some disparity, points of convergence among the majority of authors could be found. In general, healthy individuals show subtle thermal differences between contralateral homolog areas. Concerning orofacial structures, unilateral symptomatic individuals may show thermal differences equal or greater than 0.4°C. Infrared thermography accuracy in diagnosing TMD/MSD is still considered low to moderate. Despite some limitations, IRT might constitute a valuable supporting diagnostic tool in the medical field of TMD and MSD.
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