OBJETIVO: O transtorno do comprar compulsivo foi descrito pela primeira vez como uma síndrome psiquiátrica no começo do século XX. Sua classificação permanece incerta e os investigadores têm debatido uma correlação potencial com transtornos do humor, transtorno obsessivo-compulsivo e transtornos do impulso. O objetivo deste estudo é apresentar uma revisão de transtorno do comprar compulsivo e um relato de caso. MÉTODO: Duas bases de dados foram investigadas (Medline e PsycINFO) em busca de artigos publicados nos últimos 40 anos. Os unitermos selecionados foram "oniomania" e "compras compulsivas". Outros artigos relevantes também foram identificados por meio das listas de referências. RESULTADOS: O transtorno do comprar compulsivo é uma condição crônica e prevalente encontrada ao redor do mundo, que divide características comuns com transtornos do controle do impulso. Em amostras clínicas, mulheres perfazem mais de 80% dos sujeitos. Sua etiologia é desconhecida, mas mecanismos neurobiológicos e genéticos têm sido propostos. O transtorno apresenta altas taxas de comorbidade com transtornos do humor, abuso de substâncias, transtornos alimentares e transtornos do controle do impulso. CONCLUSÃO: As recomendações terapêuticas derivadas da literatura e da experiência clínica sugerem que compradores compulsivos podem se beneficiar de intervenções psicossociais. Modelos de intervenção cognitivo-comportamental de grupo parecem promissores. Ensaios farmacológicos relatam resultados conflitantes. A identificação e o tratamento das comorbidades psiquiátricas são também um aspecto chave do tratamento. Para determinar a validade do transtorno do comprar compulsivo, os futuros trabalhos devem enfocar os achados psicopatológicos e neurobiológicos específicos à síndrome.

Nowadays, the Portuguese population is aging at a fast pace. The situation is more severe in the interior regions of the country, where the rural areas have few people and have been constantly losing population; these are mostly elderly who, in some cases, live socially isolated. They are also often deprived of some types of social, health and technological services. One of the current challenges with respect to the elderly is that of improving the quality of life for those who still have some autonomy and live in their own residences so that they may continue living autonomously, while receiving the assistance of some exterior monitoring and supporting services. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm demonstrates great potential for creating technological solutions in this area as it aims to seamlessly integrate information technology with the daily lives of people. In this context, it is necessary to develop services that monitor the activity and health of the elderly in real time and alert caregivers or other family members in the case of an unusual event or behaviour. It is crucial that the technological system is able to collect data in a nonintrusive manner and without requiring much interaction with the elderly. Smartband devices are very good candidates for this purpose and, therefore, this work proposes assessing the level of acceptance of the usage of a smartbands by senior users in their daily activities. By using the definition of an architecture and the development of a prototype, it was possible to test the level of acceptance of smartbands by a sample of the elderly population—with surprising results from both the elderly and the caregivers—which constitutes an important contribution to the research field of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). The evaluation showed that most users did not feel that the smartband was intrusive to their daily tasks and even considered using it in the future, while caregivers considered that the platform was very intuitive.

Currently, solutions based on the Internet of Things (IoT) concept are increasingly being adopted in several fields, namely, industry, agriculture, and home automation. The costs associated with this type of equipment is reasonably small, as IoT devices usually do not have output peripherals to display information about their status (e.g., a screen or a printer), although they may have informative LEDs, which is sometimes insufficient. For most IoT devices, the price of a minimalist display, to output and display the device’s running status (i.e., what the device is doing), might cost much more than the actual IoT device. Occasionally, it might become necessary to visualize the IoT device output, making it necessary to find solutions to show the hardware output information in real time, without requiring extra equipment, only what the administrator usually has with them. In order to solve the above, a technological solution that allows for the visualization of IoT device information in actual time, using augmented reality and a simple smartphone, was developed and analyzed. In addition, the system created integrates a security layer, at the level of AR, to secure the shown data from unwanted eyes. The results of the tests carried out allowed us to validate the operation of the solution when accessing the information of the IoT devices, verify the operation of the security layer in AR, analyze the interaction between smartphones, the platform, and the devices, and check which AR markers are most optimized for this use case. This work results in a secure augmented reality solution, which can be used with a simple smartphone, to monitor/manage IoT devices in industrial, laboratory or research environments.

This study investigated the pattern of decision-making (DM) on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in a sample of Portuguese speaking healthy older women in Brazil with limited education: illiterate, 1–2 years, and 3–4 years of schooling. Around 164 non-demented community-dwelling women participated in the study. Among them 60 were illiterate, 52 had 1–2 years of schooling and 52 had 3–4 years of schooling. Participants completed the instruments: Brief Cognitive Screening Battery (BCSB), Mini-Mental State Examination, Verbal Fluency Test (animal category), Clock Drawing Test, Geriatric Depression Scale, Geriatric Anxiety Inventory, Digit Span Forward and Backward, Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, and IGT. The three education groups were equivalent as to age, number of diseases, medications taken daily, depression, and anxiety symptoms. In the IGT the literate older adults made more advantageous choices than the illiterate and IGT performance improved linearly with higher levels of education. IGT performance correlated significantly with all cognitive test scores with the exception of the memorization of the pictures on the BCSB. The results suggested that education influences IGT performance, with worse scores among the illiterate. Results may be used by clinicians to interpret IGT performance among seniors with low literacy levels.

The Portuguese population is aging at an increasing rate, which introduces new problems, particularly in rural areas, where the population is small and widely spread throughout the territory. These people, mostly elderly, have low income and are often isolated and socially excluded. This work researches and proposes an affordable Ambient Assisted Living (AAL)-based solution to monitor the activities of elderly individuals, inside their homes, in a pervasive and non-intrusive way, while preserving their privacy. The solution uses a set of low-cost IoT sensor devices, computer vision algorithms and reasoning rules, to acquire data and recognize the activities performed by a subject inside a home. A conceptual architecture and a functional prototype were developed, the prototype being successfully tested in an environment similar to a real case scenario. The system and the underlying concept can be used as a building block for remote and distributed elderly care services, in which the elderly live autonomously in their homes, but have the attention of a caregiver when needed.

This article documents the HashKitty platform, a distributed solution for password analysis based on the hashcat tool, designed to improve efficiency in both offensive and defensive security operations. The main objectives of this work are to utilise and characterise the hashcat tool, to develop a central platform that connects various computational nodes, to allow the use of nodes with different equipment and manufacturers, to distribute tasks among the nodes through a web platform, and to perform distributed password analysis. The results show that the presented solution achieves the proposed objectives, demonstrating effectiveness in workload distribution and password analysis using different types of nodes based on various operating systems and architectures. The architecture of HashKitty is based on a scalable and modular distributed architecture, composed of several components such as computational nodes, integration and control software, a web platform that implements our API, and database servers. In order to achieve a fast and organised development process for our application we used multiple frameworks, runtimes and libraries. For the communication between the computational nodes and the other software we made use of websockets so that we have real-time updates between them.