People at risk of suicide tend to be isolated and cannot share their thoughts. For this reason, suicidal ideation monitoring becomes a hard task. Therefore, people at risk of suicide need to be monitored in a manner capable of identifying if and when they have a suicidal ideation, enabling professionals to perform timely interventions. This study aimed to develop the Boamente tool, a solution that collects textual data from users’ smartphones and identifies the existence of suicidal ideation. The solution has a virtual keyboard mobile application that passively collects user texts and sends them to a web platform to be processed. The platform classifies texts using natural language processing and a deep learning model to recognize suicidal ideation, and the results are presented to mental health professionals in dashboards. Text classification for sentiment analysis was implemented with different machine/deep learning algorithms. A validation study was conducted to identify the model with the best performance results. The BERTimbau Large model performed better, reaching a recall of 0.953 (accuracy: 0.955; precision: 0.961; F-score: 0.954; AUC: 0.954). The proposed tool demonstrated an ability to identify suicidal ideation from user texts, which enabled it to be experimented with in studies with professionals and their patients.

Smartphones are increasingly incorporated with features such as sensors and high resolution cameras that empower their capabilities, enabling their use for varied activities including human posture assessments. Previous reviews have discussed methods used in postural assessment but none of them focused exclusively on mobile applications. This paper systematically reviews mobile applications proposed for analyzing human posture based on alignment of the body in the sagittal and coronal plane. The main digital libraries were searched, 26 articles published between 2010 and 2020 were selected, and 13 mobile applications were identified, classified and discussed. Results showed that the use of mobile applications to assist with posture assessment have been demonstrated to be reliable, and this can contribute to clinical practice of health professionals, especially the assessment and reassessment phases of treatments, despite some variations when compared to traditional methods. Moreover, in the case of image-based applications, we highlight the advantage that measurements can be taken with the assessor at a certain distance with respect to the patient’s position, which is an important function for assessments performed in pandemic times such as the outbreak of COVID-19.

[Purpose] Stretching using proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation involve physiological reflex mechanisms through submaximal contraction of agonists which activate Golgi organ, promoting the relaxation reflex. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation alone and with prior application of cryotherapy and thermotherapy on hamstring stretching. [Subjects and Methods] The sample comprised of 32 young subjects with hamstring retraction of the right limb. The subjects were randomly allocated to four groups: the control, flexibility PNF, flexibility PNF associated with cryotherapy, flexibility PNF in association with ultrasound therapy. [Results] After 12 stretching sessions, experimental groups showed significant improvements compared to the control group. Moreover, we did not find any significant differences among the experimental groups indicating PNF stretching alone elicits similar results to PNF stretching with prior administration of cryotherapy or thermotherapy. [Conclusion] PNF without other therapy may be a more practical and less expensive choice for clinical care.

Parkinson’s disease is described as resulting from dopaminergic cells progressive degeneration, specifically in the substantia nigra pars compacta that influence the voluntary movements control, decision making and time perception. This review had a goal to update the relation between time perception and Parkinson’s Disease. We used the PRISMA methodology for this investigation built guided for subjects dopaminergic dysfunction in the time judgment, pharmacological models with levodopa and new studies on the time perception in Parkinson’s Disease. We researched on databases Scielo, Pubmed / Medline and ISI Web of Knowledge on August 2017 and repeated in September 2017 and February 2018 using terms and associations relevant for obtaining articles in English about the aspects neurobiology incorporated in time perception. No publication status or restriction of publication date was imposed, but we used as exclusion criteria: dissertations, book reviews, conferences or editorial work. We have demonstrated that the time cognitive processes are underlying to performance in cognitive tasks and that many are the brain areas and functions involved and the modulators in the time perception performance. The influence of dopaminergic on Parkinson’s Disease is an important research tool in Neuroscience while allowing for the search for clarifications regarding behavioral phenotypes of Parkinson’s disease patients and to study the areas of the brain that are involved in the dopaminergic circuit and their integration with the time perception mechanisms.

Many different factors can temporarily or permanently impair movement and impairs cortical organization, e.g. hand immobilization. Such changes have been widely studied using electroencephalography. Within this context, we have investigated the immobilization effects through the theta band coherence analysis, in order to find out whether the immobilization period causes any changes in the inter and intra-hemispheric coherence within the cerebral cortex, as well as to observe whether the theta band provides any information about the neural mechanisms involved during the motor act. We analyzed the cortical changes that occurred after 48 hours of hand immobilization. The theta band coherence was study through electroencephalography in 30 healthy subjects, divided into two groups (control and experimental). Within both groups, the subjects executed a task involving flexion and extension of the index finger, before and after 48 hours. The experimental group, however, was actually submitted to hand immobilization. We were able to observe an increase in the coupling within the experimental group in the frontal, parietal and temporal regions, and a decrease in the motor area. In order to execute manual tasks after some time of movement restriction, greater coherence is present in areas related to attention, movement preparation and sensorimotor integration processes. These results may contribute to a detailed assessment of involved neurophysiological mechanism in motor act execution.