ABSTRACT
The present work proposes to develop a vital sign monitoring system for application in several health areas, such as monitoring patients with suspected COVID-19, where the system can alert the patient and the medical staff if there is a worsening in the vital signs, allowing for prompt care. Sports professionals can also use the system to evaluate performance gains based on the collected data. The monitoring system measures the percentage of blood oxygenation, heart rate, blood pressure, and the concentration of exhaled carbon dioxide in the breath. The data is sent to the cloud to be stored and processed. Using the data achieved, it should be possible to know whether there has been an improvement or worsening of patients, whether they are taking their medication correctly (pressure drop or abnormal variations), to check the maximum cadence of an exercise, through the relationship between blood oxygenation and exhaled carbon dioxide, or even to detect some diseases in their early stages. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
One of the greatest challenges for a traffic control system is to synchronize the flow of vehicles to prevent traffic jams. This issue gets worse when there are priority vehicles, such as ambulances, trying to move through the traffic. Given the current situation, with the COVID-19 pandemic, and the trends of smart cities, in this work, we propose and simulate a traffic control system that prioritizes ambulances within large urban centers, using Fuzzy logic and IoT devices. The simulation of our proposed model was performed on the software Dojot, which is an open platform for IoT modeling. It addressed a real situation, in a path that is usually used by ambulances to get to a reference hospital in the city of Campinas, Brazil. The proposed traffic control system can also be used after the COVID-19 pandemic is over in order to improve traffic flow for other priority vehicles (e.g., firefighters and police) and increase people’s life quality within smart cities. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
The present work describes the technological development of a low-cost and miniaturized instrument to Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) for detection of Sars-CoV-2 ribonucleic acid (RNA) and, potentially, an open platform for detection of other microorganisms. Most devices use a big aluminum bar coupled to a peltier to heat and cool the reaction tube;however, a lot of energy is wasted in the process. To take advantage of the energy and reduce cost–benefit of the device, we introduced the Joule Effect in the printed circuit board for heating samples, and a computer fan for cooling. Other improvements such as a precise heating sample spot, and a LM35 thermal sensor with a PID (proportional integral-derivative) algorithm to control the circuit temperature, have also been included. The processes were carried out based on cost–benefit and performance to bring to the market a robust detection platform for in vitro diagnostic tests. © 2022, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.