Abstract
Over 250 million people, worldwide, are affected by chronic lung conditions such as Asthma and COPD. These can cause breathlessness, a harsh decrease in quality of life and, if left undetected or not properly managed, even death. In this paper, we approached part of the lines of development suggested upon earlier work. This concerned the development of a system design for a smartphone lung function classification app, which would only use recordings from the built-in microphone. A more systematic method to evaluate the relevant combinations of methods was devised and an additional set of 44 recordings was used for testing purposes. The previous 101 were kept for training the models. The results enabled to further reduce the signal processing pipeline leading to the use of 6 envelopes, per recording, half of the previous amount. An analysis of the classification performances is provided for both previous tasks: differentiation into Normal from Abnormal lung function, and between multiple lung function patterns. The results from this project encourage further development of the system.

Abstract
Worldwide, over 250 million people are affected by chronic lung conditions such as Asthma and COPD. These can cause breathlessness, a harsh decrease in quality of life and, if not detected and duly managed, even death. In this paper, we aim to find the best and most efficient combination of signal processing and machine learning approaches to produce a smartphone application that could accurately classify lung function, using microphone recordings as the only input. A total of 61 patients performed the forced expiration maneuver providing a dataset of 101 recordings. The signal processing comparison experiments were conducted in a backward selection approach, reducing from 54 to 12 final envelopes, per recording. The classification experiments focused first on differentiating Normal from Abnormal lung function, and second in multiple lung function patterns. The results from this project encourage further development of the system.

Abstract
Nowadays, there are several communication gaps that isolate deaf people in several social activities. This work studies the expressiveness of gestures in Portuguese Sign Language (PSL) speakers and their differences between deaf and hearing people. It is a first effort towards the ultimate goal of understanding emotional and behaviour patterns among such populations. In particular, our work designs solutions for the following problems: (i) differentiation between deaf and hearing people, (ii) identification of different conversational topics based on body expressiveness, (iii) identification of different levels of mastery of PSL speakers through feature analysis. With these aims, we build up a complete and novel dataset that reveals the duo-interaction between deaf and hearing people under several conversational topics. Results show high recognition and classification rates.

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