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Significant efforts are currently being made to improve the quality of life of the older adult population. These efforts focus on aspects such as health, social interaction, and mental health. One of the approaches that has shown positive results in several studies is the application of game-based systems. These systems are not only used for entertainment, but also as tools for learning and promoting positive feelings. They are a means to overcome loneliness and isolation, as well as to improve health and provide support in daily life. However, it is important to note that, while these experiences are gradually being introduced to the older adult population, they are often designed with a younger audience in mind who are assumed to be more technologically proficient. This supposition can make older adults initially feel intimidated when interacting with this type of technology, which limits their ability to fully utilize and enjoy these technological solutions. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to apply a game experience and fun evaluation process oriented toward the older adult population based on the playability theory of human-computer interaction in virtual reality game experiences. This is expected to offer highly rewarding and pleasurable experiences, which will improve engagement with the older population and promote active and healthy aging.
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Jogos de Vídeo , Humanos , Idoso , Qualidade de Vida , Realidade Virtual , Interface Usuário-ComputadorRESUMO
Amblyomin-X is a Kunitz-type FXa inhibitor identified through the transcriptome analysis of the salivary gland from Amblyomma sculptum tick. This protein consists of two domains of equivalent size, triggers apoptosis in different tumor cell lines, and promotes regression of tumor growth, and reduction of metastasis. To study the structural properties and functional roles of the N-terminal (N-ter) and C-terminal (C-ter) domains of Amblyomin-X, we synthesized them by solid-phase peptide synthesis, solved the X-Ray crystallographic structure of the N-ter domain, confirming its Kunitz-type signature, and studied their biological properties. We show here that the C-ter domain is responsible for the uptake of Amblyomin-X by tumor cells and highlight the ability of this domain to deliver intracellular cargo by the strong enhancement of the intracellular detection of molecules with low cellular-uptake efficiency (p15) after their coupling with the C-ter domain. In contrast, the N-ter Kunitz domain of Amblyomin-X is not capable of crossing through the cell membrane but is associated with tumor cell cytotoxicity when it is microinjected into the cells or fused to TAT cell-penetrating peptide. Additionally, we identify the minimum length C-terminal domain named F2C able to enter in the SK-MEL-28 cells and induces dynein chains gene expression modulation, a molecular motor that plays a role in the uptake and intracellular trafficking of Amblyomin-X.
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BACKGROUND: The potential of chatbots for screening and monitoring COVID-19 was envisioned since the outbreak of the disease. Chatbots can help disseminate up-to-date and trustworthy information, promote healthy social behavior, and support the provision of health care services safely and at scale. In this scenario and in view of its far-reaching postpandemic impact, it is important to evaluate user experience with this kind of application. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to evaluate the quality of user experience with a COVID-19 chatbot designed by a large telehealth service in Brazil, focusing on the usability of real users and the exploration of strengths and shortcomings of the chatbot, as revealed in reports by participants in simulated scenarios. METHODS: We examined a chatbot developed by a multidisciplinary team and used it as a component within the workflow of a local public health care service. The chatbot had 2 core functionalities: assisting web-based screening of COVID-19 symptom severity and providing evidence-based information to the population. From October 2020 to January 2021, we conducted a mixed methods approach and performed a 2-fold evaluation of user experience with our chatbot by following 2 methods: a posttask usability Likert-scale survey presented to all users after concluding their interaction with the bot and an interview with volunteer participants who engaged in a simulated interaction with the bot guided by the interviewer. RESULTS: Usability assessment with 63 users revealed very good scores for chatbot usefulness (4.57), likelihood of being recommended (4.48), ease of use (4.44), and user satisfaction (4.38). Interviews with 15 volunteers provided insights into the strengths and shortcomings of our bot. Comments on the positive aspects and problems reported by users were analyzed in terms of recurrent themes. We identified 6 positive aspects and 15 issues organized in 2 categories: usability of the chatbot and health support offered by it, the former referring to usability of the chatbot and how users can interact with it and the latter referring to the chatbot's goal in supporting people during the pandemic through the screening process and education to users through informative content. We found 6 themes accounting for what people liked most about our chatbot and why they found it useful-3 themes pertaining to the usability domain and 3 themes regarding health support. Our findings also identified 15 types of problems producing a negative impact on users-10 of them related to the usability of the chatbot and 5 related to the health support it provides. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that users had an overall positive experience with the chatbot and found the health support relevant. Nonetheless, qualitative evaluation of the chatbot indicated challenges and directions to be pursued in improving not only our COVID-19 chatbot but also health chatbots in general.
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Amblyomin-X is a Kunitz-type FXa inhibitor identified through the transcriptome analysis of the salivary gland from Amblyomma sculptum tick. This protein consists of two domains of equivalent size, triggers apoptosis in different tumor cell lines, and promotes regression of tumor growth, and reduction of metastasis. To study the structural properties and functional roles of the N-terminal (N-ter) and C-terminal (C-ter) domains of Amblyomin-X, we synthesized them by solid-phase peptide synthesis, solved the X-Ray crystallographic structure of the N-ter domain, confirming its Kunitz-type signature, and studied their biological properties. We show here that the C-ter domain is responsible for the uptake of Amblyomin-X by tumor cells and highlight the ability of this domain to deliver intracellular cargo by the strong enhancement of the intracellular detection of molecules with low cellular-uptake efficiency (p15) after their coupling with the C-ter domain. In contrast, the N-ter Kunitz domain of Amblyomin-X is not capable of crossing through the cell membrane but is associated with tumor cell cytotoxicity when it is microinjected into the cells or fused to TAT cell-penetrating peptide. Additionally, we identify the minimum length C-terminal domain named F2C able to enter in the SK-MEL-28 cells and induces dynein chains gene expression modulation, a molecular motor that plays a role in the uptake and intracellular trafficking of Amblyomin-X.
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Over seven million people suffer from an impairment in Mexico; 64.1% are gait-related, and 36.2% are children aged 0 to 14 years. Furthermore, many suffer from neurological disorders, which limits their verbal skills to provide accurate feedback. Robot-assisted gait therapy has shown significant benefits, but the users must make an active effort to accomplish muscular memory, which usually is only around 30% of the time. Moreover, during therapy, the patients' affective state is mostly unsatisfied, wide-awake, and powerless. This paper proposes a method for increasing the efficiency by combining affective data from an Emotiv Insight, an Oculus Go headset displaying an immersive interaction, and a feedback system. Our preliminary study had eight patients during therapy and eight students analyzing the footage using the self-assessment Manikin. It showed that it is possible to use an EEG headset and identify the affective state with a weighted average precision of 97.5%, recall of 87.9%, and F1-score of 92.3% in general. Furthermore, using a VR device could boost efficiency by 16% more. In conclusion, this method allows providing feedback to the therapist in real-time even if the patient is non-verbal and has a limited amount of facial and body expressions.
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Reabilitação do Acidente Vascular Cerebral , Realidade Virtual , Criança , Emoções , Terapia por Exercício/métodos , Marcha , Humanos , Reabilitação do Acidente Vascular Cerebral/métodosRESUMO
User experience (UX) is a quality aspect that considers the emotions evoked by the system, extending the usability concept beyond effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction. Practitioners and researchers are aware of the importance of evaluating UX. Thus, UX evaluation is a growing field with diverse approaches. Despite various approaches, most of them produce a general indication of the experience as a result and do not seek to capture the problem that gave rise to the bad UX. This information makes it difficult to obtain relevant results to improve the application, making it challenging to identify what caused a negative user experience. To address this gap, we developed a UX evaluation technique called UX-Tips. This paper presents UX-Tips and reports two empirical studies performed in an academic and an industrial setting to evaluate it. Our results show that UX-Tips had good performance in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, making it possible to identify the causes that led to a negative user experience, and it was easy to use. In this sense, we present a new technique suitable for use in both academic and industrial settings, allowing UX evaluation and finding the problems that may lead to a negative experience.
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Emoções , Interface Usuário-Computador , Satisfação PessoalRESUMO
People with severe disabilities may have difficulties when interacting with their home devices due to the limitations inherent to their disability. Simple home activities may even be impossible for this group of people. Although much work has been devoted to proposing new assistive technologies to improve the lives of people with disabilities, some studies have found that the abandonment of such technologies is quite high. This work presents a new assistive system based on eye tracking for controlling and monitoring a smart home, based on the Internet of Things, which was developed following concepts of user-centered design and usability. With this system, a person with severe disabilities was able to control everyday equipment in her residence, such as lamps, television, fan, and radio. In addition, her caregiver was able to monitor remotely, by Internet, her use of the system in real time. Additionally, the user interface developed here has some functionalities that allowed improving the usability of the system as a whole. The experiments were divided into two steps. In the first step, the assistive system was assembled in an actual home where tests were conducted with 29 participants without disabilities. In the second step, the system was tested with online monitoring for seven days by a person with severe disability (end-user), in her own home, not only to increase convenience and comfort, but also so that the system could be tested where it would in fact be used. At the end of both steps, all the participants answered the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, which showed that both the group of participants without disabilities and the person with severe disabilities evaluated the assistive system with mean scores of 89.9 and 92.5, respectively.
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Pessoas com Deficiência/reabilitação , Medições dos Movimentos Oculares , Monitorização Fisiológica/métodos , Interface Usuário-Computador , Adolescente , Adulto , Feminino , Humanos , Internet , Masculino , Tecnologia Assistiva , Adulto JovemRESUMO
Our recent studies have shown that cross-talk between histone deacetylase 5 (HDAC5) and lysine-specific demethylase 1 (LSD1) facilitates breast cancer progression. In this work, we demonstrated that regulatory activity at -356 to -100 bp promoter element plays a critical role in governing HDAC5 transcription. By using DNA affinity precipitation and mass spectrometry, we identified a group of factors that bind to this element. Among these factors, Upstream Transcription Factor 1 (USF1) was shown to play a critical role in controlling HDAC5 transcription. Through screening a panel of epigenetic modifying drugs, we showed that a natural bioactive HDAC inhibitor, sulforaphane, downregulated HDAC5 transcription by blocking USF1 activity. Sulforaphane facilitated LSD1 ubiquitination and degradation in an HDAC5-dependent manner. A comparative microarray analysis demonstrated a genome wide cooperative effect of HDAC5 and LSD1 on cancer-related gene expression. shRNA knockdown and sulforaphane inhibition of HDAC5/LSD1 exhibited similar effects on expression of HDAC5/LSD1 target genes. We also showed that coordinated cross-talk of HDAC5 and LSD1 is essential for the antitumor efficacy of sulforaphane. Combination treatment with sulforaphane and a potent LSD1 inhibitor resulted in synergistic growth inhibition in breast cancer cells, but not in normal breast epithelial cells. Furthermore, combined therapy with sulforaphane and LSD1 inhibitor exhibited superior inhibitory effect on MDA-MB-231 xenograft tumor growth. Taken together, our work demonstrates that HDAC5-LSD1 axis is an effective drug target for breast cancer. Inhibition of HDAC5-LSD1 axis with sulforaphane blocks breast cancer growth and combined treatment with LSD1 inhibitor improves the therapeutic efficacy of sulforaphane.
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Apoptose/efeitos dos fármacos , Biomarcadores Tumorais/metabolismo , Neoplasias da Mama/patologia , Regulação Neoplásica da Expressão Gênica/efeitos dos fármacos , Histona Desacetilases/metabolismo , Histona Desmetilases/metabolismo , Isotiocianatos/farmacologia , Animais , Biomarcadores Tumorais/genética , Neoplasias da Mama/tratamento farmacológico , Neoplasias da Mama/metabolismo , Proliferação de Células/efeitos dos fármacos , Epigênese Genética , Feminino , Inibidores de Histona Desacetilases/farmacologia , Histona Desacetilases/química , Histona Desacetilases/genética , Histona Desmetilases/antagonistas & inibidores , Histona Desmetilases/genética , Humanos , Camundongos , Camundongos Endogâmicos BALB C , Camundongos Nus , RNA Interferente Pequeno/genética , Sulfóxidos , Células Tumorais Cultivadas , Fatores Estimuladores Upstream/genética , Fatores Estimuladores Upstream/metabolismo , Ensaios Antitumorais Modelo de XenoenxertoRESUMO
The hand is an important part of the body used to express information through gestures, and its movements can be used in dynamic gesture recognition systems based on computer vision with practical applications, such as medical, games and sign language. Although depth sensors have led to great progress in gesture recognition, hand gesture recognition still is an open problem because of its complexity, which is due to the large number of small articulations in a hand. This paper proposes a novel approach for hand gesture recognition with depth maps generated by the Microsoft Kinect Sensor (Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA) using a variation of the CIPBR (convex invariant position based on RANSAC) algorithm and a hybrid classifier composed of dynamic time warping (DTW) and Hidden Markov models (HMM), called the hybrid approach for gesture recognition with depth maps (HAGR-D). The experiments show that the proposed model overcomes other algorithms presented in the literature in hand gesture recognition tasks, achieving a classification rate of 97.49% in the MSRGesture3D dataset and 98.43% in the RPPDI dynamic gesture dataset.
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Gestos , Processamento de Imagem Assistida por Computador/métodos , Reconhecimento Automatizado de Padrão/métodos , Algoritmos , Bases de Dados Factuais , HumanosRESUMO
Interactive digital technologies are currently being developed as a novel tool for education and skill development. Audiopolis is an audio and haptic based videogame designed for developing orientation and mobility (O&M) skills in people who are blind. We have evaluated the cognitive impact of videogame play on O&M skills by assessing performance on a series of behavioral tasks carried out in both indoor and outdoor virtual spaces. Our results demonstrate that the use of Audiopolis had a positive impact on the development and use of O&M skills in school-aged learners who are blind. The impact of audio and haptic information on learning is also discussed.
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Pyrazole compounds are an intriguing class of compounds with potential analgesic activity; however, their mechanism of action remains unknown. Thus, the goal of this study was to explore the antinociceptive potential, safety and mechanism of action of novel 1-pyrazole methyl ester derivatives, which were designed by molecular simplification, using in vivo and in vitro methods in mice. First, tree 1-pyrazole methyl ester derivatives (DMPE, MPFE, and MPCIE) were tested in the capsaicin test and all presented antinociceptive effect; however the MPClE (methyl 5-trichloromethyl-3-methyl-1H-pyrazole-1-carboxylate) was the most effective. Thus, we selected this compound to assess the effects and mechanisms in subsequent pain models. MPCIE produced antinociception when administered by oral, intraperitoneal, intrathecal and intraplantar routes and was effective in the capsaicin and the acetic acid-induced nociception tests. Moreover, this compound reduced the hyperalgesia in diverse clinically-relevant pain models, including postoperative, inflammatory, and neuropathic nociception in mice. The antinociception produced by orally administered MPClE was mediated by κ-opioid receptors, since these effects were prevented by systemically pre-treatment with naloxone and the κ-opioid receptor antagonist nor-binaltorphimine. Moreover, MPCIE prevented binding of the κ-opioid ligand [(3)H]-CI-977 in vitro (IC50 of 0.68 (0.32-1.4) µM), but not the TRPV1 ([(3)H]-resiniferatoxin) or the α2-adrenoreceptor ([(3)H]-idazoxan) binding. Regarding the drug-induced side effects, oral administration of MPClE did not produce sedation, constipation or motor impairment at its active dose. In addition, MPCIE was readily absorbed after oral administration. Taken together, these results demonstrate that MPClE is a novel, potent, orally active and safe analgesic drug that targets κ-opioid receptors.
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Analgésicos/farmacologia , Pirazóis/farmacologia , Receptores Opioides kappa/agonistas , Antagonistas de Receptores Adrenérgicos alfa 2 , Analgésicos/administração & dosagem , Analgésicos/antagonistas & inibidores , Analgésicos/química , Animais , Benzofuranos , Diterpenos , Vias de Administração de Medicamentos , Avaliação Pré-Clínica de Medicamentos , Idazoxano , Masculino , Camundongos , Estrutura Molecular , Naloxona/farmacologia , Naltrexona/análogos & derivados , Naltrexona/farmacologia , Antagonistas de Entorpecentes/farmacologia , Medição da Dor , Pirazóis/administração & dosagem , Pirazóis/antagonistas & inibidores , Pirazóis/química , Pirrolidinas , Ensaio Radioligante , Receptores Opioides kappa/antagonistas & inibidores , Canais de Cátion TRPV/efeitos dos fármacos , TrítioRESUMO
O aparecimento de eventos trombóticos em pacientes com câncer ocorre com incidência acima daquela estimada, isto por que a trombose é subdiagnosticada neste grupo de pacientes. Esse estudo tem como objetivo identificar a freqüência de eventos trombóticos diagnosticados em pacientes do HC1 (Instituto Nacional do Câncer) no período de 30 meses e correlacionar com os seguintes fatores de risco: faixa etária, presença de anticorpos anti-fosfolipídeos, níveis de fatores da coagulação. O estudo de 1437 pacientes submetidos a exames para diagnóstico de trombose (de um movimento de 16522 internações e 11253 cirurgias na instituição) mostrou uma alta freqüência de tromboses diagnosticadas na instituição (477 eventos de tromboses venosas e arteriais e 39 eventos de tromba embolismo pulmonar). Não houve diferença no risco de trombose nas três faixas etárias avaliadas (até 18 anos, 19 a 59 anos e acima de 59 anos), a presença de anticorpo anti-cardiolipina não aumentou o risco de tromboses, porém a presença de anticoagulante lúpico aumentou o risco de tromboses em mais de três vezes. Dos 81 pacientes estudados no ambulatório devido à suspeita de distúrbio da hemostasia pelos exames de triagem, a maioria apresentava níveis de fatores de coagulação normais ou acima do normal, sendo que acima de 50% deles com níveis trombogênicos de fibrinogênio, fator VIII ou fator IX. Porém, apesar do aumento dos níveis de fatores de coagulação não houve um aumento na freqüência de trombose neste grupo de pacientes
The real frequency of thrombotic events in cancer patients is probably underestimated; under diagnosis is one of the main reasons. The aim of this study is to identify the frequency of thrombotic events diagnosed on patients at HC1 (Instituto Nacional do Câncer) on a 30 month period and correlate with the following risk factors: age, presence of antiphospholipid antibodies, (LA and aCL) measurement of the clotting factors levels and tissue factor expression. Studing 1437 patients submited to diagnosis proceedings for thrombosis (from a population of 16,522 in patients and 11,253 surgeries), we found a high frequency of thrombosis at our cancer institution (477 events of arterial and venous thrombosis and 39 pulmonary emboli). There weren't differences on thrombotic risk factors among the three age groups (bellow 18, 19 to 59 and above 60). The presence of IgG or IgM aCL did not show a higher risk for thrombosis, but the presence of LA had a three fold increase in thrombotic risk. Df the 81 patients studied for clotting disorders, more than half had thrombogenic values of clotting factors (fibrinogen, factors VIII and IX), but despite these high levels of factors there wasn't an increased thrombotic event rate risk in this group