Universidade de Pernambuco

About: Universidade de Pernambuco is a education organization based out in Recife, Brazil. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Medicine. The organization has 6147 authors who have published 6948 publications receiving 73648 citations.

All-around care for patients with Chagas disease: a challenge for the XXI century

Abstract: In 1987, the University of Pernambuco's Oswaldo Cruz Hospital in Recife, Brazil opened its Chagas Disease and Heart Failure Outpatient Clinic with the aim of providing its patients all-around care through adoption of a biopsychosocial model of care. All-around care involves caring for the patient as a whole human being in the context of the biological, psychological and social factors present, which are an inherent part of the human condition. One prerequisite for the proposed model of care is the participation of a multidisciplinary team of trained technical staff committed to this framework. Although the main focus of the service is on care, teaching and research are also an important part of its work. The Pernambuco Association of Chagas Disease Patients is guided by the same model of care and has been carrying out educational activities relating to the disease, its treatment and support for patients and family members for several years. This Association plays an important role in advocating to public authorities on behalf of patients. The accumulated experience of the past 22 years has shown us that a broad vision of health care can help clinicians and policy makers to make decisions that are more in tune with the everyday reality of the patient, which in turn has a positive impact on adherence to treatment and quality of life.

The Emerging Web of Social Machines

Abstract: We define a notion of social machine and envisage an algebra that can describe networks of such. To start with, social machines are defined as tuples of input, output, processes, constraints, state, requests and responses; apart from defining the machines themselves, the algebra defines a set of connectors and conditionals that can be used to describe the interactions between any number of machines in a multitude of ways, as a means to represent real machines interacting in the real web, such as Twitter, Twitter running on top of Amazon AWS, mashups built using Twitter and, obviously, other social machines. This work is not a theoretical paper as yet; but, in more than one sense, we think we have found a way to describe web based information systems and are starting to work on what could be a practical way of dealing with the complexity of this emerging web of social machines that is all around us. This version should be read as work in progress and comments, observations, bugs... are most welcome and should be sent to the email of the first, corresponding author.