Abstract
The present context of women physicists in Portugal is discussed, updating our report for the 2002 IUPAP International Conference on Women in Physics, in which the 30 years prior to 2000 were analyzed.

Abstract

Abstract
The success of artificial prosthetic replacements depends on the fixation of the artificial prosthetic component after being implanted in the thighbone. This work shows a smart prosthesis based on highly sensitive silicon thin-film piezoresistive sensors attached to a hip prosthesis. The performance of the sensors for this application is studied and compared to commercial strain gauge sensors. Mechanical stress-strain experiments were performed in compressive mode, during 10,000 cycles and data was acquired at mechanical vibration frequencies of 0.5 Hz, I Hz and 5 Hz, and sent to a computer by means of a wireless link. The results show that there is a decrease in sensitivity of the thin-film silicon piezoresistive (n-type nanocrystalline Si) sensors when they are attached to the prosthesis, however this decrease does not compromise its monitoring performance. The sensitivity, compared to that of commercial strain gauges, is much larger due to their higher gauge factor (-23.5), when compared to the gage factor of commercial sensors (2).

Abstract
Falls of patients are an important issue in hospitals nowadays; it causes severe injuries, increases hospitalization time and treatment costs. The detection of a fall, in time, provides faster rescue to the patient, preventing more serious injuries, as well as saving nursing time. The MovinSense (R) is an electronic device designed for monitoring patients to prevent pressure sores, and the main goal of this work was to develop a new tool for this device, with the purpose of detecting if the patient has fallen from the hospital bed, without changing any of the device's original features. Experiments for gathering data samples of inertial signals of falling from the bed were obtained using the device. For fall detection a sensitivity of 72% and specificity of 100% were reached. Another algorithm was developed to detect if the patient got out of his/her bed.

Abstract
Multi-agent systems (MAS) paradigm is a suitable approach to implement distributed manufacturing systems addressing the emergent requirements of flexibility, robustness and responsiveness. In such systems, the distributed agents have a local view of the system environment being the global data collection a complex and critical issue to provide the functionalities of the ISA-95 standard, such as dynamic scheduling, maintenance management and quality assurance. This paper describes the data collection mechanisms in a multi-agent system that supports the global monitoring over the time and the trend analysis to perform self-adaptation and self-optimization. The proposed approach was developed and tested in an industrial washing machines production line.

Abstract
The introduction of various novel imaging technologies such as narrow-band imaging have posed novel image processing challenges to the design of computer assisted decision systems. In this paper, we propose an image descriptor refered to as integrated scale histogram local binary patterns. We propagate an aggregated histogram of local binary patterns of an image at various resolutions. This results in low dimensional feature vectors for the images while incorporating their multiresolution analysis. The descriptor was used to classify gastroenterology images into four distinct groups. Results produced by the proposed descriptor exhibit around 92% accuracy for classification of gastroenteroloy images outperforming other state-of-the-art methods, endorsing the effectiveness of the proposed descriptor.