Leading Health Care

Objective: To evaluate the anthropometric indicators and food consumption of people with Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus treated at a Basic Health Unit in the city of São Luís, Maranhão. Methods: This is a cross-sectional and descriptive study with a quantitative approach conducted with 36 patients who have Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus, treated at a Basic Health Unit in the capital city of Maranhão. Semi-structured forms were used to collect sociodemographic and anthropometric data, as well as related to eating habits. The analyses were performed using descriptive statistics, with data represented as mean, frequency and their respective standard deviations, in addition to Pearson's correlation test between the quantitative variables. Results: The sample was mostly represented by women (54.4%), older adults (59.6%), sedentary people (63.1%), who had high abdominal obesity (80.4%), ingested a low amount of fiber (93.5%) and consumed a large amount of protein (67.4%), saturated fat (69.6%) and sucrose (57.5%). Conclusion: Factors such as inadequate weight and unregulated eating habits can represent risks for glycemic control and contribute to worsening of Diabetes Mellitus. Descritores: Diabetes mellitus. Estado nutricional. Consumo de alimentos.

Impaired persons often have difficulties in obtaining suitable clothing. Questionnaires on this subject were sent to a consecutive series of impaired persons. Group 1 (n = 50) had received adapted clothes and group 2 (n = 81) had not. Questionnaire A (both groups) contained general questions on clothes and questionnaire B (Group 1) contained questions on adapted clothes. The result of the study shows a significant difference (p less than 0.01) between the need for adapted clothing in group 1 and group 2. No significant difference was found between the groups regarding the reason for obtaining and using adapted clothes. It was difficult for 94% in group 1 and 85% in group 2 to obtain clothes which were suitable for the individual's impairment and which made their daily activities easier. In group 1 the adapted garments were of most value when dressing and undressing (86%). They also reduced the time needed, by 31% for the individual, by 43% for a helper; and by 62% when going to the toilet. The adapted garments were considered smarter and more comfortable by 64%. Eighteen per cent considered that wearing them had increased their self-confidence.

Cet article rend compte d’une innovation pédagogique menée dans une école d’ingénieurs par une association indépendante : l’atelier matières à construire - amàco. Le projet visait à modifier les conceptions et les pratiques dans le domaine de la construction durable et le défi consistait à intégrer, dans l’ingénierie pédagogique, les principes d’une philosophie de la matière qui invite à faire corps avec la matière. Après trois années d’une expérimentation pédagogique avec la matière, dans le cadre d’un soutien financier à l’innovation, une démarche d’investigation, basée sur la théorie ancrée, a été entreprise pour observer, d’une part, les effets sur l’expérience formative des étudiants et le développement de leurs compétences professionnelles et, d’autre part, les modifications des pratiques d’enseignement des enseignants impliqués dans le projet. L’analyse montre que les changements les plus apparents concernent les enseignants qui transforment radicalement leur enseignement au-delà de l’expérience. Les effets sur le développement professionnel des étudiants sont plus difficiles à saisir bien qu’il y ait de bonnes indications qu’ils entrent dans le monde professionnel avec une vision accordant plus de place aux enjeux de la construction durable et au renouvellement du contact entre l’homme et son environnement.

We provide two main contributions in PAC-Bayesian theory for domain adaptation where the objective is to learn, from a source distribution, a well-performing majority vote on a different, but related, target distribution. Firstly, we propose an improvement of the previous approach we proposed in Germain et al. (2013), which relies on a novel distribution pseudodistance based on a disagreement averaging, allowing us to derive a new tighter domain adaptation bound for the target risk. While this bound stands in the spirit of common domain adaptation works, we derive a second bound (introduced in Germain et al., 2016) that brings a new perspective on domain adaptation by deriving an upper bound on the target risk where the distributions' divergence-expressed as a ratio-controls the trade-off between a source error measure and the target voters' disagreement. We discuss and compare both results, from which we obtain PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds. Furthermore, from the PAC-Bayesian specialization to linear classifiers, we infer two learning algorithms, and we evaluate them on real data.

Sideband holography can be used to get fields images (E0 and E1) of a vibrating object for both the carrier (E0) and the sideband (E1) frequency with respect to vibration. We propose here to record E0 and E1 sequentially, and to image the correlation E1E * 0 . We show that this correlation is insensitive the phase related to the object roughness and directly reflect the phase of the mechanical motion. The signal to noise can be improved by averaging the correlation over neighbor pixel. Experimental validation is made with vibrating cube of wood and with a clarinet reed. At 2 kHz, vibrations of amplitude down to 0.01 nm are detected.