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People with food hypersensitivities experience adverse reactions when eating certain foods and thus need to adapt their diet. When dining out, the challenge is greater as people entrust the care of their allergy, intolerance, or celiac disease, in the hands of staff who might not have enough knowledge to appropriately care for them. This interview study explored how people with food hypersensitivities avoid reactions while eating out, to inspire future digital technology design. Our findings show the social and emotional impact of food hypersensitivities and how people practically cope by investigating restaurants’ safety precautions, correcting orders, or even educating restaurants’ staff. We discuss our findings against the experiences of other people living with chronic conditions and offer design opportunities for digital technologies to enhance dining out experiences of people with food hypersensitivities.

Background Many rehabilitation clinics adopted serious games to support their physiotherapy sessions. Serious games can monitor and provide feedback on exercises and are expected to improve therapy and help professionals deal with more patients. However, there is little understanding of the impacts of serious games on the actual work of physiotherapists. Objective This study aimed to understand the impact of an electromyography-based serious game on the practical work of physiotherapists. Methods This study used observation sessions in an outpatient rehabilitation clinic that recently started using a serious game based on electromyography sensors. In total, 44 observation sessions were performed, involving 3 physiotherapists and 22 patients. Observation sessions were documented by audio recordings or fieldnotes and were analyzed for themes with thematic analysis. Results The findings of this study showed that physiotherapists played an important role in enabling the serious game to work. Physiotherapists briefed patients, calibrated the system, prescribed exercises, and supported patients while they played the serious game, all of which amounted to relevant labor. Conclusions The results of this work challenge the idea that serious games reduce the work of physiotherapists and call for an overall analysis of the different impacts a serious game can have. Adopting a serious game that creates more work can be entirely acceptable, provided the clinical outcomes or other advantages enabled by the serious game are strong; however, those impacts will have to be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Moreover, this work motivates the technology development community to better investigate physiotherapists and their context, offering implications for technology design.

The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory routes they followed during various phases of the expansion remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the genetic profiles of southwestern and southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples located at the edges of the Bantu expansion by generating genome-wide data for 200 individuals from 12 Mozambican and 3 Angolan populations using ∼1.9 million autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Incorporating a wide range of available genetic data, our analyses confirm previous results favoring a “late split” between West and East Bantu speakers, following a joint passage through the rainforest. In addition, we find that Bantu speakers from eastern Africa display genetic substructure, with Mozambican populations forming a gradient of relatedness along a North-South cline stretching from the coastal border between Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. This gradient is further associated with a southward increase in genetic homogeneity, and involved minimum admixture with resident populations. Together, our results provide the first genetic evidence in support of a rapid North-South dispersal of Bantu peoples along the Indian Ocean Coast, as inferred from the distribution and antiquity of Early Iron Age assemblages associated with the Kwale archaeological tradition. Introduction Results and Discussion - Genetic Variation in Mozambique - Genetic Relationships with Other African Populations Conclusion Materials and Methods - Population Samples - Genotyping and Phasing - Data Merging - Genetic Data Analysis - Linguistic Data Analysis

Green roofs are systems that can help to solve some urban environmental problems. A multi-layer green roof has five layers: from waterproof membrane till substrate and vegetation. Substrate is arguably the most important component of green roofs but there is still much to opti-mize and exploit. Also, world needs to avoid uncontrolled dispersal of waste. This new approach can be applied to substrates production. The main objective of this study is to compare and eval-uate 8 substrates incorporating industrial wastes with a commercial substrate. Employed plants were Armeria welwitschii, Festuca glauca and Sedum sediforme. Alongside, the rhizosphere eu-karyotic biocenosis (protists communities) were observed in optical microscope. Preliminary re-sults revealed that some industrial wastes may replace commonly used materials on green roofs substrate increasing plant growth. With regards to eukaryotic biocenosis, the performed observa-tions, point out that, these organisms can be good bioindicators for green roof technology., This work has been co-financed by Compete 2020, Portugal 2020 and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund – FEDER within the scope of the project EGR - EcoGreenRoof: Desenvolvimento de eco-materiais para coberturas verdes (POCI-01-0247-FEDER-033728).

The Bantu expansion, which started in West Central Africa around 5,000 BP, constitutes a major migratory movement involving the joint spread of peoples and languages across sub-Saharan Africa. Despite the rich linguistic and archaeological evidence available, the genetic relationships between different Bantu-speaking populations and the migratory routes they followed during various phases of the expansion remain poorly understood. Here, we analyze the genetic profiles of southwestern and southeastern Bantu-speaking peoples located at the edges of the Bantu expansion by generating genome-wide data for 200 individuals from 12 Mozambican and 3 Angolan populations using ∼1.9 million autosomal single nucleotide polymorphisms. Incorporating a wide range of available genetic data, our analyses confirm previous results favoring a “late split” between West and East Bantu speakers, following a joint passage through the rainforest. In addition, we find that Bantu speakers from eastern Africa display genetic substructure, with Mozambican populations forming a gradient of relatedness along a North-South cline stretching from the coastal border between Kenya and Tanzania to South Africa. This gradient is further associated with a southward increase in genetic homogeneity, and involved minimum admixture with resident populations. Together, our results provide the first genetic evidence in support of a rapid North-South dispersal of Bantu peoples along the Indian Ocean Coast, as inferred from the distribution and antiquity of Early Iron Age assemblages associated with the Kwale archaeological tradition.

Home-based rehabilitation systems can speed up recovery by enabling patients to exercise at home between rehabilitation sessions. However, home-based rehabilitation systems need to monitor and feedback exercises appropriately, as incorrect or imperfect exercises negatively impact the recovery of the patient. This paper describes a methodology for assessing the quality of rehabilitation exercises using inertial sensors, for a system that tracks exercises using surface electromyography sensors. This duality extends the information provided by the electromyography system since it provides a more comprehensive evaluation of posture and movement correctness. The methodology was evaluated with 17 physiotherapy patients, obtaining an average accuracy of 96% in detecting issues in the exercises monitored. The insights of this work are a first step to complement an electromyography-based home system to detect issues in movement and inform patients in real time about the correctness of their exercises.

Recent advances in sequencing allow the study of all identified human genes (≈ 22,000 protein encoding genes), which have differential expression between tissues. However, current knowledge on gene interactions lags behind, especially when one of the elements encodes a mitochondrial protein (≈ 1500). Mitochondrial proteins are encoded either by mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA; 13 proteins) or by nuclear DNA (nDNA; the remaining), which implies a coordinated communication between the two genomes. Since mitochondria coordinate several life-critical cellular activities, namely energy production and cell death, deregulation of this communication is implicated in many complex diseases such as neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and diabetes. Thus, this work aimed to identify high co-expression groups between mitochondrial genes-all genes, and associated protein networks in several human tissues (Genotype-Tissue Expression database). We developed a pipeline and a web tree viewer that is available at GitHub (https://github.com/Pereira-lab/CoExpression). Biologically, we confirmed the existence of highly correlated pairs of mitochondrial-all protein encoding genes, which act in pathways of functional importance such as energy production and metabolite synthesis, especially in brain tissues. The strongest correlation between mtDNA genes are with genes encoded by this genome, showing that correlation among genes encoded by the same genome is more efficient.

This paper focuses on the process of developing a framework that features Multi-Agent System and Fire Simulation in a game engine, resulting in a gaming infrastructure which may be played as a serious game to train users for emergency situations. Scenarios are generated dynamically with different types of characters controlled by the computer, Non-Playable-Characters (NPC). The computer controlled firefighters will go for rescue in an indoor fire scenario, while the player is able to either help them by playing a fellow firefighter or just watch the NPCs solve the situation. These NPCs are made using a Unity3D plug-in named RAIN to speed up the development process, which helps modelling the perceptions of the agents and their behaviours. These processes will be described and the result is a rescue simulation tool showing advantages in debugging behavioural models, which leverages the creation of these types of simulations. The less the player realizes that a firefighter is in fact an NPC being treated as another human player, the more likely the player is expected to behave socially. The current version of the simulation environment is available for download and free to play so readers can test and experiment with the implemented framework.

Understanding human behaviour in emergency evacuation from buildings is of utmost importance for fire safety designers, architects and engineers as they elaborate on strategies to improve the emergency paths to exits. This paper describes an experiment designed to elicit human behaviour when facing the urgent need of exiting a room of an unknown building. This test is part of a methodological approach that aims at the creation of a framework coined SPEED (Simulation of Pedestrians and Elicitation of their Emergent Dynamics). A population sample of 22 subjects was used to test such a methodological approach, which consists in having the subjects answering a questionnaire and later on, in playing a Serious Game. The game environment presents the same scenarios shown in the questionnaire using more elaborated 3D rendering to provide players with a sense of realism. The game was developed under the Unity3D game engine and based on the Serious Games concept. Preliminary results are promising, showing that the challenge made players think about the various situations that might happen when facing an emergency. They are also implied to reason on their stream of decisions, such as which direction to take considering the environment and some adverse situations, such as smoke, fire and people running on the opposite direction of the emergency signalling.

The dynamics of pedestrians have received less attention in transportation systems when compared to cars and other transportation means. However, its importance is inarguable and, recently, a lot of effort on research was put into this field. The use of Agent-Based Models (ABM) and known techniques such as the Social Forces Model (SFM) has fostered this most recent application field. Several models are already available for crowd simulation, but the validation of such models is a critical issue. Methodologies for behaviour elicitation and validation in social simulation models are needed. In this paper, a new framework to tackle these problems is proposed. Based on research made for more specific applications, concerned with buildings' evacuation, a methodological approach to develop a simulator for pedestrian's dynamics consisting of five main tasks is proposed hereafter. The tasks are: 1) "Reference Models and Benchmarks" 2) "Pedestrian Sensor Fusion, 3) "Serious Games for Pedestrian Behaviour Elicitation" 4) "Behaviour Mining, " and 5) "Agent-Based Modelling and Simulation of Pedestrian Elicitation of Emergent Dynamics, " a Decision Support Tool aimed at the study and analysis at pedestrian dynamics in the urban context, specifically for helping planners to develop the new generation of buildings and cities.

The traditional framework under which error-correcting codes can enable secrecy involves the use of nested codes. While this structure provide us with means to achieve weak secrecy, it is not clear how these codes can be applied to varying wiretap channels. In the spirit of rate-compatible codes, we propose a new framework for coding for the wiretap channel. The proposed scheme is based on random-puncturing, where the puncturing pattern is kept secret from the eavesdropper. Our results indicate that such strategy can indeed achieve high equivocation-rates (even when the channel is degraded) without the need to re-design the underlying codes.

The problem of leaving a building while facing some emergency has gained much attention from the scientific community. Evacuation simulators can help emergency planners to assess the safety of buildings. However, such simulators still lack behavioural knowledge to increase their accuracy. The elderly have specific behaviour idiosyncrasies. This paper presents a set of experiments designed to elicit human behaviour in evacuation scenarios using serious games, applied to a population sample of 20 adults aged over 65 years. They were presented three experiments (alarm id, exit-choice in five different situations and auditorium with four situations) and their reactions were collected. Results were analysed and compared with previous similar experiments. Future directions in this research include: to expand and to refine data collection to other scenarios and perform massive data collection using the internet; and to use this data to feed and enhance existing crowd simulators particularly for evacuation purposes.

We propose a probabilistic key distribution protocol for vehicular network that alleviates the burden of traditional public-key infrastructures. Roadside units act as trusted nodes and are used for secret-sharing among vehicles in their vicinity. Secure communication is immediately possible between these vehicles with high probability. Our performance evaluation, which uses both analysis and simulation, shows that high reliability and short dissemination time can be achieved with low complexity.

Physical-layer security based on wiretap codes can be used to complement cryptographic applications at higher layers of the protocol stack. We assume a passive eavesdropper that has access to noise-corrupted codewords with erasures that are statistically independent to those of the legitimate communication partners. Our goal is to minimize the information leaked to the eavesdropper. In this paper we present a low-complexity coding scheme for channels with feedback, which employs extensive interleaving of carefully punctured LDPC codewords. The key idea is to ensure that every transmitted packet is crucial for successful decoding. This is achieved by ensuring that stopping-set bit combinations for coded blocks are distributed among different packets and by enforcing that retransmission requests be restricted to the friendly parties. A probabilistic analysis reveals that an eavesdropper who uses a message-passing decoding algorithm will experience catastrophic decoding failure with high probability. This encoder thus provides physical-layer secrecy which is both independent from, and complementary of, the cryptographic layer. The proposed scheme works even when an eavesdropper has a better channel than the legitimate receiver.

The evacuation of complex buildings is a challenge under any circumstances. Fire drills are a way of training and validating evacuation plans. However, sometimes these plans are not taken seriously by their participants. It is also difficult to have the financial and time resources required. In this scenario, serious games can be used as a tool for training, planning and evaluating emergency plans. In this paper a prototype of a serious games evacuation simulator is presented. To make the environment as realistic as possible, 3D models were made using Blender and loaded onto Unity3D, a popular game engine. This framework provided us with the appropriate simulation environment. Some experiences were made and results show that this tool has potential for practitioners and planners to use it for training building occupants., Comment: 26th European Conference on Modelling and Simulation ECMS 2012, Koblenz, Germany; ISBN: 978-0-9564944-4-3

Among possible emergency situations, those that very likely will mostly affect human behavior are the ones related to fire, due to the many reasons associated with its initiation. The prediction of the human behavior in the reply to a fire situation requires an integrated system that involves the people, the building and the fire. It is expectable that people will answer differently to distinct and varying fire situations, which will depend on a diverse range of factors. This paper summarizes a case-study on the human behavior under fire situations, based on the analysis of data collected through a questionnaire, applied to the Portuguese population nationwide. There were 14 questions related to fire, to which 225 answers were obtained. Within these 225 answers, 50 originated from people that actually experienced or were involved in a fire situation. The study was already able to point out some trends in the behavioral analysis. However, it is not ready to fully support the development of a simulation model capable of estimating the pre-movement time. With this purpose, other questionnaires are being designed, which will be associated with results gathered from the observation of a number of real-life simulated evacuation scenarios. As a continuation the methodological approach devised in this work, and in order to implement validation and calibration techniques, a simulation software tool is being implemented, which combines the state-of-the-art concepts of multi-agent systems and serious games. These two concepts support the implementation of a virtual and interactive environment that will allow for subjects’ behavior to be elicited and classified according to different user profiles. The resulting behavioral patterns, together with results from the first part of this study, will feed the devised model to more accurately validate it. 10 fig. 11 p DED/NAU 2011 15 a 16 de Agosto

Emergency evacuation plans and evacuation drills are mandatory in public buildings in many countries. Their importance is considerable when it comes to guarantee safety and protection during a crisis. However, sometimes discrepancies arise between the goals of the plan and its outcomes, because people find it hard to take them very seriously, or due to the financial and time resources required. Serious games are a possible solution to tackle this problem. They have been successfully applied in different areas such as health care and education, since they can simulate an environment/task quite accurately, making them a practical alternative to real-life simulations. This paper presents a serious game developed using Unity3D to recreate a virtual fire evacuation training tool. The prototype application was deployed which allowed the validation by user testing. A sample of 30 individuals tested the evacuating scenario, having to leave the building during a fire in the shortest time possible. Results have shown that users effectively end up learning some evacuation procedures from the activity, even if only to look for emergency signs indicating the best evacuation paths. It was also evidenced that users with higher video game experience had a significantly better performance., CISTI 2012 - 7 Conferencia Ib\'erica de Sistemas y Tecnolog\'ias de Informaci\'on, pp 771-776, Madrid, Spain. ISBN: 978-989-96247-6-4

In this paper we report on a methodology to model pedestrian behaviours whilst aggregate variables are concerned, with potential applications to different situations, such as evacuating a building in emergency events. The approach consists of using UWB (ultra-wide band) based data collection to characterise behaviour in specific scenarios. From a number of experiments carried out, we detail the single-file scenario to demonstrate the ability of this approach to represent macroscopic characteristics of the pedestrian flow. Results are discussed and we can conclude that UWB-based data collection shows great potential and suitability for human trajectory extraction, when compared to other traditional approaches., Comment: 24th European Modeling & Simulation Symposium - EMSS 2012, Vienna, Austria