Abstract
As we observe society in our days, we can see that people live longer; this means that we have an older population, more likely to have health issues. The special needs presented by the elderly are becoming a major concern for all of us, along with the lack of time demonstrated by society as a whole and, as a consequence, the lack of time is seen when families are not able to take care of their own elders. Many solutions are being presented in order to solve this problem. Some of them are taking advantage of the new technological developments in the body sensor networks area. In this paper we propose the architecture of a system called Elder Care. The Elder Care solution has two primary goals: monitoring vital signs, sending alerts to family and to specialized help and providing a social network in order to help end the elderly's social isolation. © Copyright by authors.

Abstract
Computed tomography (CT) can contribute to the early detection of lung diseases like emphysema, a chronic and progressive disease. Texture-based methods can be explored to classify regions of interest (ROI's) into emphysematous areas and normal areas. In this work we evaluated the importance of a set of parameters in the classification of lung CT images, such as the size of the ROIs, the quantization level, and textural features used in classification. A support vector machine was used as classifier. The performance of the designed classifier was evaluated using a 10-fold cross validation method and the results compared based on overall accuracy, sensibility and specificity. This study shows that textural features have a good discriminatory power in the classification of lung emphysema in CT images.

Abstract
To understand the importance of technologies like the Internet and Learning Management Systems to Higher Education students' learning activities, this study characterizes the Internet access behaviour of Polytechnic of Porto (IPP)' students. Student's habits were obtained through a questionnaire that was answered by 10% of all IPP students. Our analysis is focused not only on the global Internet usage profile under the Polytechnic of Porto, but also on the differences between the students born before and after 1980. International trends are confirmed in this Portuguese Higher Education institution.

Abstract
The usage of information and communication technologies has been growing among students and teachers. In order to improve the use of the Internet as a tool to support teaching and learning it is necessary to understand the Internet usage habits of students. Thus, a study was conducted with 1397 students from five schools of the Polytechnic of Porto. The data was collected through an online questionnaire abd was analized by age range, gender and scientific field. In this paper,gender differences are analyzed and presented in 3 dimensions: type of Internet usage, communication tools and the role of the Internet tools in education.

Abstract
It is recognized by the Information Retrieval community that context affects the retrieval process. Query formulation and relevance assessment are stages where the user role is central. The first determines what the system will search for and the second is frequently used to evaluate how the system behaved. With a large human involvement, these stages are expected to be largely influenced by user and task characteristics. To analyze the influence of these context features on the specified stages of health information retrieval, we conducted a user study in which we collected user features through two questionnaires. User characteristics include features like age, gender, web search experience, health search experience and familiarity with the medical topic. Task features include the medical specialty, the question type, the task's clarity and the task's easiness. Besides user and task features, the relevance assessment analysis also covered features related to the query and document. We found many variables do indeed affect query formulation and relevance judgment. Some of our results question evaluations using test collections and ask for evaluation models that incorporate other kind of success measures. Copyright 2010 ACM.

Abstract
We have conducted a user study to evaluate several generalist and health-specific search engines on health information retrieval. Users evaluated the relevance of the top 30 documents of 4 search engines in two different health information needs. We introduce the concepts of local and global precision and analyze how they affect the evaluation. Results show that Google surpasses the precision of all other engines, including the health-specific ones, and that precision differs with the type of clinical question and its medical specialty.