O projeto mobilizador nº 46078 - Smart Farm tem como objetivo facilitar a transição para agricultura digital das explorações agrícolas, independentemente da sua dimensão, por via de : Conceber e desenvolver soluções acessíveis com base nas tecnologias, para a aplicação em horti, fruti e viticultura; Dinamizar práticas de agricultura sustentável, preditiva, autónoma e geradoras de elevado valor acrescentado, na região oeste, e a nível nacional e internacional. Soluções inteligentes para uma agricultura sustentável, preditiva e autónoma.

Economies and societies are seen as embedded parts of the biosphere (FOOD 2030 Future-Proofing our Food systems through Research and Innovation https://fit4food2030.eu/ ); we can addthat science is the element that brings all three together.This moves discussions away from the current sectoral approach - where social, economic, andecological development are seen as separate parts - towards an economy serving society in the safespace of the planet. Using this model we can argue that all the sustainable development goals aredirectly or indirectly connected to sustainable and healthy food.The main objective is to improve curricula to meet student learning needs in line with labour marketrequirements, in economic, biological and agricultural fields.The target group will be represented by professors, researchers and students (undergraduatestudents, master and doctoral students) from partner institutions.The specific objectives are:-to improve the skills of teachers and researchers from partners institutions through the trainingsessions that will take place in the project.- to outline a group of young students with international experience to work as a future specialist inthe fields of organic farming and eco-entrepreneurship.- to allow a larger group of students from host countries to benefit from the expertise of teachers frompartner countries.- to encourage universities to improve the content of masters programs on the basis of informationgathered in exchanges of good practices between the involved partners. One of the outputs of theproject is represented specifically by a protocol that aims to harmonize the curricula offered tostudents within the education providers.The transnational dimension is essential in achieving this partnership: each partner will bring into theproject its expertise and the regional particularities (from the originate partners countries) that arevery important in the field. The level of organic farming development, the impact on society and the...

The goal of this project will be to investigate the emotional dimension of movies, to further provide support for the classification, access, navigation and visualization of movie collections, not only including previous descriptors (genre, actors), but also emotions expressed in their content and felt by the viewers, during and after watching movies. This holds the potential to increase emotional awareness and empower future users to regulate their emotions when accessing and watching movies. To accomplish these objectives, there are four scientific challenges that we will address in the project: 1. Evaluate and select most relevant dimensions in emotional impact and predictors of enjoyment and gratifications from movies, understand viewer’s preferences, and the importance perceived in receiving emotional information. This will allow us to identify the most relevant emotional responses to use for the evaluation of the emotional impact, to inform a better support in emotional elicitation, movie classification, and access; 2. Capture the emotional impact of movies, as felt and perceived by the viewers, for classification and indexing. This will help future users to gain more awareness about the emotional impact of watching movies and allow to access movies based on these emotions; 3. Analyze and classify movie content based on the processing of three information streams: subtitles, audio, and visual video content, with a special focus on emotional information; 4. Conceive and create effective interactive access, navigation and visualization of the movies based on their content and their emotional impact on viewers, with the potential to provide insights based on the information visualized, and the users’ emotional profiles, choices, and states.  http://awesome.di.fc.ul.pt/

The continuous aging of the population has increased health risks, leading to the need for close monitoring of elder citizens and patients. Fortunately, the field of e-Health has been experiencing great progress, although it still faces challenges, since it needs to be applied without compromising the mobility or lifestyle of monitored patients. The challenges facing the development of mobile health monitoring devices are mainly related to power consumption, size, weight, safety, and privacy. Addressing such challenges, WeHope project aims to design the next generation of mobile health monitoring systems, through designing an integrated “in-shoe” optical fiber sensor network, which is able to monitor health conditions by observing physiological parameters in the foot. The WeHope project will design small non-invasive high precision integrated optical fiber sensor network, which is immune to electromagnetic interference and intrinsically electric safe. Such optical fiber sensing network, based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) technology, will be integrated with a mobile interrogation monitor (FBG-IM) interfacing, and software for remote control of the FBG-IM. The aim of the proposed project is to enhance the life quality of patients; hence WeHope system needs to perform continuous health monitoring without compromising patients’ lifestyle by guaranteeing free mobility. The project thus investigates the provision of ubiquitous energy efficient wireless connectivity with a monitoring application in the cloud. Energy efficiency is key to prolong the lifetime of the system; thus providing longer periods of mobility without the need for recharging. Finally, the project will propose an innovative security scheme to protect sensitive transmitted data, while preserving patient’s privacy, such as location, with an efficient revocation scheme when required (i.e. in emergency situations).

Information System (IS) offers much promise to improve information management for physiotherapists. IS may improve clinical and administrative reporting capabilities, operational efficiency, communication among health professionals, communication with patients, data accuracy and the capacity to support clinical research. However, the key factor for success of healthcare information system implementation and adoption is engagement of end-user. Tailored information system is proposed in this project, enable to non-invasively/unobtrusively measure balance and movements as well as to improve the effectiveness of physiotherapy based on serious game and augmented reality. Wireless body sensors network (WSN) will be developed for better balance and movements’ characterization. Usability tests of tailored virtual environment for physiotherapy will be carried out as well usability tests of information system developed for physiotherapy practice based on implemented WSN, serious game and augmented reality. The system may improve the effectiveness of physiotherapy and enable measuring additional constructs to enhance more comprehensive clinical reasoning processes (i.e., motor control, determinants for behavioural change and patient engagement).

The objective of this paper is to evaluate from the output surface the damage of the catalytic tubes of the columns of the reformer furnaces in order to predict its remaining life. Catalytic tubes are the most critical components in reformer furnaces. Reformer furnaces are widely used in the petrochemical industry to produce hydrogen from hydrocarbons. It is in the radiant tubes containing a catalyst that the hydrogen production takes place, as a result of endothermic reactions between hydrocarbons (mostly methane) and water vapor. These reactions proceed at a temperature range between 800 and 900 deg C and the working pressure in a reformer furnace is between 2 and 5 MPa. These are severe working conditions that cause structural damage in the tubes. It is necessary to develop methods for the inspection of tube degradation and for a realistic prediction of its residual life.Some analytical methods have been developed to estimate reformer columns service life or the time to failure, as the assessment of damage and advance planning of column replacement should be made to ensure that failures or unplanned shutdowns are avoided. However, direct methods to evaluate the probable extent of damage and remaining life in a particular furnace are always much more preferable. Nowadays, direct tests are performed destructively by examining metallographically the microstrutural changes and creep damage on a series of ring samples cut along the length of single tube removed from the reformer furnace. The objective of this project is to project and implement an in-situ measurement system to inspect through a nondestructive testing (NDT) technique, based on eddy currents, reformer tubes damages to infer about its remaining life. The eddy current method is based on the excitation of the material with a time variable magnetic field. In this way, the electromotive force developed inside the material will give rise to electric eddy currents. These currents are related to the conductivit...

The aim of the project is to design Electronic Health Records for Physiotherapy using determined requirements from perspective of patients and physiotherapists needs and perceived barriers to adoption. Patient-Physiotherapist-Designer (PPD) Framework will describe the concerns and attitudes that patients and their caregiver might have on the concept of electronic health records, as well as potential barriers to acceptance, such as variation in computer skills, and technology awareness. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of collected data using Delphi process, The Inventory of Patients Needs on EHRs for Physiotherapy, The Inventory of Physiotherapists Perspectives on EHRs for Physiotherapy and conclusions from Patient-Physiotherapist-Designer (PPD) Framework will give an overview with respect to the needs of EHRs for the domain of Physiotherapy. The pilot deployments will allow usability tests and evaluation of methods for data collection in physiotherapy practice.

The axle bearing damage process has safety and economic implications on the exploitation of railways systems, as proved by the selection of this topic for inclusion in the present call for research proposals of the FP7 of the EU. Axle bearing damage has been the object of intense attention by railway operators and transportation authorities, leading to a variety of approaches and systems currently in place to deal with the problem. However in Europe there is some lack of standardisation which justifies R&D work on condition monitoring and early diagnosis of axle bearings by technology integration. Moreover the current European documents do not present any guidelines for the maintenance management of the rolling stocks with regards to axle bearings, which make the association of monitoring, diagnosis and maintenance an interesting approach. The MAXBE project appears in this context and its strategic objective is to provide validated and demonstrated concepts, strategies and guidelines for the interoperable axle bearing monitoring and diagnosis that support the railway operators and managers dealing with the threats imposed by the existence of axle bearing defects. The consortium for the MAXBE project comprises 17 partners (industry, leading universities, end-users and a SME) from 8 member states, representing operators, axle bearing manufactures, key players in the railway community and experts in the field of monitoring, maintenance and rolling stock. The presence in the consortium of one axle bearing manufacturer, market leader in the field, and three operators and railway managers, as end-users, is decisive for the enhancement and optimisation of the axle bearing diagnosis and maintenance strategies and for the definition of the new proposed approaches for the interoperability. The MAXBE project will have impact for the reliability, availability, maintainability and safety (RAMS) of rolling stock and infrastructure, focused on the axle bearings.

Throughout the world, engineers and technicians are working together finding cracks and other anomalies to prevent expensive failures. The increasingly important role of nondestructive testing in public security and safely technology development promote new and innovative methods to be developed and already known methods do be enhanced. Eddy Current Testing (ECT) is one of the most established nondestructive structure evaluation technique that enables defect detection and material condition monitoring with high sensitivity and reliability. Within this method the volume distribution of the material conductivity is determined by inducing eddy currents inside the conductor under test and measuring the magnetic field produced by those currents [6]. ECT is used with electrically conductive materials for the measurement of the thickness of metallic plates [7] or non-metallic coatings or metal substrates, estimation of electrical conductivity or magnetic permeability distribution, corrosion detection [8] and the determination of surface or subsurface defects [9]. However, regarding safety and economic efficiency assessment, defects are still the main concern and with the improvements on understanding the facture mechanics, the detailed geometric characterization of the cracks, still an open problem, became the target of the research in the area. One disadvantage of this type of method is related to the inevitability of well qualified and experienced technicians to perform the tests since, in spite of its implementation simplicity, data produced by eddy current based equipment are among the most complicated to interpret.These factors together motivate the project objectives: to implement new and better measurements with both novel instrumentation and embedded artificial intelligence to automate the interpretation of the various imaging data streams in order to determine surface and subsurface defects shape and size [10].With eddy currents nondestructive evaluation, the dime...

The coupling of ultrasound waves into solid media on a material surface point followed by the wave detection on another point can be used to infer about the wave propagation conditions. The wave suffers reflections on the material boundaries, but is attenuated or diffracted on existing material discontinuities. It is possible to obtain valuable information about material defects by an accurate analysis of the wave propagation conditions.In this project we intend to apply the ultrasound method to establish an experimental method of defects detection inside solid structures whose structural health monitoring is of great importance. This is the case of the aircraft structures, the liquid or gas pipelines in nuclear power plants or other containers subject to high pressures. To our knowledge, the most important inspection task at this time is the assessment of possible internal defects inside the stainless steel containers of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER).

The purpose of this project is to automate the measuring procedures used in the different Monitoring Centers of ANACOM (Portuguese Telecommunications Regulator) to monitor and control the radiofrequency spectrum in Portuguese territory. The automation must allow remote operation, that is to say, to perform tests for instance in Azores from another Center, namely the main one sited in Barcarena.

Developing unobtrusive monitoring of electrocardiogram and respiratory activities using sensors installed inhousehold furniture in everyday life completed with RFID elementsto provide a safe and healthy place for the elderlyDeveloping appropriate health data and tracking data analysis tools important observations (e.g. general health and activitylevels, activities of daily living (ADL).Advanced data processing for accurate cardiac and respiratory signal monitoring

The main objective is to implement a prototype of a system that allows non-invasive monitoring of cardiac and respiratory parameters of people living in non-hospital environments

Research activities related with water quality assessment and its impact in ecosystems, particularly dolphins life

The present project intends to develop a new platform for labs monitoring and control thatintegrates in a single system the energy management, operation safety, security, environmentquality , workbench and lab equipments.The interactivity with the system will be done through touch screen based interfaces integratedin the workbench/equipment/building with characteristics adequate for laboratorial use. Thesystem can also be accessed remotely through internet.

Non destructive testing (NDT) is of paramount importance for ensuring the integrity of materials. Eddy currents testing (ECT) is one of several methods like, remote field testing (RFT), flux leakage and Barkhausen noise, that use electromagnetic theory to examine conducting materials. It is a particularly attractive test because it offers both very high detectability and high scanning speeds. Besides direct contact with the test material is not necessary.Nowadays, with the use of microprocessor based measuring instruments, the potential and user-friendliness of eddy currents testing has been greatly enhanced. The role of the computer has two different components: one related with the possibility to automate the measuring system (data acquisition control, data processing, signal classification and displaying) and other with numerical modeling of the testing process. The computing capabilities are used to quantitatively predict eddy current signals for realistic situations and to evaluate crack profiles from testing signals by solving the inverse problem of the physical phenomenon under test. At this time the tasks related to the data acquisition, signal processing and graphical representation, are already under way, with some work already published [1-6,8,9].The point is that the inverse problem of computing the crack profiles from the eddy currents data is ill-posed, i.e., the crack profiles are not univocally determined by the measured eddy currents. A possible approach to mitigate the ill-posedness nature of this inverse problem is to classify the crack profiles according to the different types of material defects. The idea is to exploit the a priori knowledge of the problem and thus select the proper defect model. In order to investigate the assumptions of the technique, particularly, patterns identification, a huge amount of data is essential and experimentation is necessary.

The measuring principle is based on the phenomenon whereby the impedance of a coil generating a time-varying magnetic field changes in the presence of a conductive material as eddy currents are induced in the material. Therefore the idea of a contactless electrical conductivity imaging system (CECIS) is based on a sensor composed of two coils. One of the coils, designated the transmitter coil, is driven by an alternating current and generates an oscillating magnetic field that induces currents inside the object to be tested. These induced currents are related to the conductivity distribution of the body. Another coil, the receiver coil, measures the total magnetic field. One component of the magnetic field is related to the primary imposed currents and the other component is related to the induced eddy currents. As the signal originated from deeper voxel significantly attenuates before it reaches the receiving coil the information gets easily corrupted by measurement noise. By incorporating into the design a real time digital signal processor able to perform advanced signal processing techniques it is possible to increase significantly the range of the sensor. Two solutions are envisaged to accumulate data either by relocating the probe several times using a XY scanning mechanism or by using an array of sensors, i. e., several probes in the vicinity of the object to be tested.The mathematical basis of this methodology is developed in two parts. In the first part, the physics of the induction system is simulated in the forward problem either using a numerical method like the finite element method (FEM) or an artificial intelligent technique (ANN). The simulated system is used to preview the correspondence between first order variations in the secondary magnetic field to conductive perturbations in the conductive body. A set of equations in the discrete form can be formulated: Sx=b, where x is the unknown conductivity perturbation vector, b is the magnetic field measu...

The project main objective is to promote new connections between National Research Institutes, such as Instituto de Telecomunicações and the research units of the Portuguese Polytechnic Schools and groups of professor and students from Secondary Schools in the area of interdisciplinary research of environment monitoring. Considering that a bottlenose dolphin community is localized in the Sado Estuary the project propose an interdisciplinary research associated with dolphin behavior monitoring through underwater sounds acquisition and processing and at the same time the monitoring of the water quality in Sado Estuary in order to obtain correlations between the dolphin life behavior an aquatic environment conditions. An important component of the project is to realize multimedia presentation related to the systems for dolphin and water quality monitoring and the experimental data obtained during the field monitoring session or obtained in the laboratory conditions.

1. Study, development, implementation and testing of different systems to track dolphins. 2. Development and implementation of a distributed monitoring system for the acquisition and recording of wide-band acoustic signals (up to 200 kHz) associated with both wild dolphins’ community and anthropogenic underwater noise.3. Evaluation of water parameters that affect dolphins’ behaviour and deployment of units to measure and remotely transmit the values of those parameters using solutions already developed by some of team’s members in the context of FCT project Global Monitoring Based on Smart Sensors for Environment Quality.4. Design and implementation of advanced techniques to analyse the data acquired by the hydrophones using namely time-frequency and neural networks based techniques in order to filter, compress, fuse, and classify the patterns of the acoustic signals and water quality parameters’ values.5. Creation of a SMARDO Web site where projects’ results are published and through which team’s obtained experimental data can be accessed by the national and international community.

Research activities related with water quality assessment and study of dolphins' sounds and life habitat

Research activities related with the development of distributed instrumentation solutions for environmental monitoring

The purpose of the project is to update and increase the measuring capabilities of the Instrumentation and Measurement Group - Institute of Telecommunications - Lisbon. The Group develops research and development mainly in six major areas of Metrology: analog-to-digital conversion, measurement of electric quantities, measurement of non-electric quantities, data acquisition and processing, telemetry and automated measuring systems. The Group is also increasingly engaged is assisting Portuguese industry and services.The equipment proposed for acquisition includes two type of items: general purpose instruments and dedicated instruments. While the general purpose instruments proposed aim at the update and increase of flexibility and capabilities of existing measuring means, the dedicated equipment pretends to overcome major measuring limitations in two domains: analog-to-digital conversion and measurement of non-electric quantities for environmental quality monitoring.

The main objective and original contribution of this project is the study, design and implementation of intelligent automated measurement systems for the continuous monitoring of parameters considered important for the environment quality. These systems include smart cells (i.e. smart sensors or smart actuators) for some physical quantities with digital processing structures with prediction capabilities. As new intelligent techniques that will be developed within the project it should be underlined:·The sensor fusion and integration that combine the information in a way that removes inconsistencies and presents clearly the best interpretation of readings input from many individual sources.·Neural and neuro-fuzzy information processing that includes linearisation, prediction and the correction of sensor characteristics.Another direction of work will be the establishment of a client-server architecture linked through a computer network for distributed measurement systems. The client performs the continuous monitoring of the electrical signals related to the quantities to be measured and their transmission to the server database. For the water quantities the transmission is via the Global Standard for Mobile telecommunication (GSM) and a Global Position Sensor (GPS) is used for sensors position detection.