Abstract

Abstract
In continental Portugal, the publicly financed supply of gastroenterology exams was limited since the end of the last century, restricted to a fixed set of private providers that was hired by the Portuguese state. This way of contracting created market entry barriers and is inefficient, since prices are administratively set. Besides, it produced access inequalities, because of the way that the supply was geographically distributed. This paper applies the Extended Kernel Density 4-Step Floating Catchment Area (EKD4SFCA) method to identify priority districts for the promotion of new supply by the state, in order to choose the appropriate way of contracting new private supply, as determined by current law, and to reduce access inequalities. The applied method enables the identification of the Portuguese regions with strong competition between health care providers and where patients’ access to publicly financed gastroenterology exams is relatively low. In these regions, the state should promote public bids to stimulate new supply, exploring thereby the potential for setting lower prices and reducing access inequalities.

Abstract
Exergames require obtaining or computing information regarding the players’ physical activity and context. Additionally, ensuring that the players are assigned challenges that are adequate to their physical ability, safe and adapted for the current context (both physical and spatial) is also important, as it can improve both the gaming experience and the outcomes of the exercise. However, the impact adaptivity has in the specific case of virtual reality exergames still has not been researched in depth. In this paper, we present a virtual reality exergame and an experimental design aiming to compare the players’ experience when playing both adaptive and regular versions of the game. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.

Abstract

Abstract
In this work it is presented a system to help the users to maintain an active lifestyle. Our main objective is to evaluate the current mobile technologies for the development of systems to monitor the users' health and to promote a healthy lifestyle. It was developed a full system, including: an application for smartwatch; an application for smartphone; a back-end with a webservice in PHP. The application provides the functionalities to acquire the user's: heart rate; location, based on the GPS position; the number of steps; the position's elevation; etc. The back-end is used to register the data acquired and processed by the applications. The design was user centric and the development methodology was based on the agile paradigm, for which are described three development iterations.

Abstract
Metadata puts research data in their context, making data intelligible and apt to sustain technology evolution and to be reused, in compliance with the FAIR principles. The workflow proposed in this work includes metadata generation in the context of research projects, created with the Dendro platform, and metadata originated in the interaction of people with the deposited data, created with the B2NOTE service from EUDAT. In our experiments, datasets are prepared with Dendro, taking into consideration general-purpose descriptors and domain-specific ones, then transparently deposited in B2SHARE. After publication, B2NOTE provides an environment where authors, other researchers, and any interested party can enrich the description with less formal comments, tags or keywords. This work contributes with (a) a set of use cases in several domains, (b) details on the descriptors used by authors in each case, and (c) reflections on the use of data after publication, using the B2NOTE contributions. © Copyright 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.