During the last decade, there was a great technological advance in the development of smart sensors, low-power processors, and wireless communication protocols that when put together create a wireless sensor network (WSN). Smart, autonomous, and self-aware: that is the ultimate vision for WSNs. The success of this vision depends fundamentally on the self-management solutions. This work deals with this challenge: to provide a self-management solution for a WSN that monitors temperature and evaluates fire risks. We focus on self-organization, self-configuration, self-service, and self-maintenance. In particular, we propose service negotiation policies to demonstrate the self-service concept. The results reveal that the management solution can promote the productivity of network resources and the quality of the provided services.

Age-related pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic changes have been extensively documented, and several concurrent diseases may underlie multiple drug therapy in the elderly. As a result, the risk of adverse drug reactions and drug interactions increases among aged patients. However, only a few studies have compared the prescribing patterns for different age groups of hospitalized patients or have evaluated the effect of age on drug prescription. To compare the prevalence of drug prescriptions for elderly inpatients, with those for non-elderly inpatients, in order to assess age-related differences in the number of prescribed drugs, drug choices and prescribed doses, and to evaluate the prescription appropriateness for the elderly patients. Cross-sectional survey. 400-bed tertiary care general teaching hospital. All inpatients on one day of June 1995, except for the Intensive Care Unit and for the Departments of Psychiatry, Pediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynecology. All medicines prescribed to the eligible patients on the study day were recorded from the prescription sheets provided by the hospital pharmacy. Name, therapeutic class, and mean daily dose of the prescribed drugs. Of the 273 eligible inpatients, 46.5% were 14-44 years old, 33% were 45-64 years old and 20.5% were > 64 years old. Cancer was significantly more frequent among the elderly. The mean number of prescribed drugs was five for all age groups. The five most prescribed drugs for all patients were dipyrone, ranitidine, dipyrone in a fixed-dose combination, metoclopramide and cefazolin. The elderly had significantly more prescriptions for insulin, furosemide and enoxaparin. For most drugs, the mean prescribed dose showed that there was no dose adjustment for elderly patients, and drug choices for this age group were sometimes questionable. There was little variation in the prescribing patterns for the elderly when compared with the other age strata.

A wireless sensor network aims to collect data and, sometimes, control an environment. This kind of network is composed of hundreds to thousands of devices that have the capability of sensing, processing and wireless communicating, called sensor nodes. The sensor nodes are projected with small dimensions (cm/sup 3/ or mm/sup 3/) and this size limitation ends up restraining the node resources, like energy, processor and transceiver capacity. The task of building and deploying management systems in environments where there will be tens of thousand of network elements with particular features and organization is very complex. This task becomes worse due to the physical restrictions of these unattended sensor nodes. In this paper we have implemented and evaluated some automatic services of configuration and performance management, proposed by a WSN management architecture called MANNA. This architecture is based on the paradigm of self-management, which contains the automatic functions and services of management using a minimum of human interference. This work aims to evaluate different WSN configurations considering an application of continuous data sensing and dissemination, and the effects of the management solution proposed for this network. The built application does temperature and carbon monoxide concentration level monitoring, in an urban area. The results show the cost-benefit relations of the different organizations and demonstrates that management can promote the productivity of the resources and control the quality of the provided services.

Diante do atual cenário da gestão dos resíduos sólidos no Brasil, faz-se necessário além do diagnóstico da geração, a composição desses resíduos, para que o planejamento e a formulação de estratégias sejam mais eficientes e estejam alinhadas com os preceitos da Política Nacional dos Resíduos sólidos (PNRS).Desse modo,este trabalho teve como objetivos caracterizar os resíduos sólidos gerados na Ilha de Cotijuba, identificar os resíduos recicláveis comercializados, realizar comparação desses resíduos em contexto nacional e avaliar as condições de trabalho dos catadores de recicláveis que atuam na Ilha, por meio de entrevistas, realizadas de forma direta e semiestruturada, assim como, da quantificação e caracterização dos resíduos, através da análise gravimétrica, composta por três etapas: quarteamento, identificação e pesagem das categorias de resíduos. De posse dos dados de composição gravimétrica, constatou-se que a dinâmica de disposição dos tipos de resíduos presentes na Ilha de Cotijuba obedecem à tendência nacional, e somente para a categoria papel e papelão houve uma diferença notável. Sendo as misturascom residuos orgânicos, o fator que mais inviabilizaa reciclagem dos resíduos, que por sua vez, tornam-se rejeitos. Assim, nota-se a importância da coleta seletiva, como alternativapara a solução de parte do problema da destinação adequada dos resíduos sólidos urbanos, por possibilitar o melhor reaproveitamento dos materiais recicláveis e da matéria orgânica para a comunidade local. Somado a isso, são necessáriasações de educação ambiental da comunidade local, treinamento dos cooperados e política de gestão de resíduos sólidos adaptadas a realidade da Ilha.