Jerffeson Souza’s research while affiliated with State University of Ceará and other places

O Prontuário Eletrônico do Paciente (PEP) é uma estrutura fundamental para manutenção da informação sobre a saúde do indivíduo, cujos dados demandam interoperabilidade e privacidade no fornecimento de cuidados aos pacientes. Nesse contexto, o uso de blockchain se demonstra promissor por permitir que diferentes atores formem uma rede que compartilha informações confiáveis, favorecendo a disponibilidade e integridade. Porém, tal integração ainda deve lidar com o desafio da escalabilidade em blockchain, o que pode ser um impasse em PEPs tendo em vista a quantidade de dados intrínseca ao domínio da saúde. Como parte de uma pesquisa em desenvolvimento, este artigo apresenta um modelo arquitetural preliminar e um estudo experimental o qual avalia o uso de uma estratégia off-chain para lidar com o desafio da escalabilidade no contexto de PEP baseado em blockchain. Contribui-se, portanto, no avanço da adoção de blockchain em projetos de PEP.

As soft skills não são triviais de serem ensinadas, embora sejam preponderantes de serem aprimoradas durante a formação acadêmica de engenheiros de software. Compreender como tais habilidades são percebidas e exercidas durante o estágio supervisionado demonstra-se salutar, tendo em vista a oportunidade de lapidação formativa dos discentes. Sob a lente da Teoria das Práticas, esta pesquisa investiga como ocorre o organizar de soft skills enquanto feixe de práticas cooperativas no ambiente de estágio da Universidade Federal do Ceará (Campus de Crateús). Dentre as contribuições, destacam-se i) a proposição de um modelo conceitual para investigação das práticas cooperativas; ii) contraste analítico entre feitos e ditos; iii) reflexão empı́rica aos alunos sobre o papel das soft skills e iv) diagnóstico dos aprendizados obtidos.

Objective to estimate the prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis and associated factors. Methods a retrospective study that evaluated 74,006 cases of tuberculosis registered in the Notifiable Diseases Information System. In the multivariate analysis, the outcome variable “drug resistance” was used to estimate the prevalence ratio of factors associated with drug resistance. Results a rate of 0.5% of drug resistance was estimated (n=388). A higher prevalence was observed in cases classified as relapse, post-dropout re-entry, and transfer. There was a 53.0% increase when sputum smear microscopy was positive and a 6.5 increase for positive sputum culture. The opposite effect was observed when the diagnostic test for human immunodeficiency virus was not performed. Conclusion a low prevalence of drug-resistant tuberculosis was estimated compared to international scenarios. The main factors associated with the disease were related to retreatments and positive sputum smear and culture results.

Objective: To estimate the prevalence of tuberculosis treatment abandonment and its associated factors. Method: Cross-sectional study which used cases of tuberculosis in the System of Information on Notification Aggravations (Sistema de Informação de Agravos de Notificação) from 2001 to 2017 in Ceará state. This study included 74,006 cases and the outcome was the closing situation "treatment abandonment". A multivariate analysis was performed to estimate the association between the variables with abandonment. Results: Throughout the period, the abandonment rate was 12.54%. A higher abandonment prevalence was verified among people who live in the urban zone (PR = 2.45; 95%CI: 2.20-2.74), who are readmitted after abandonment (PR = 2.84; 95%CI: 2.68-3.01), among those notified as recurrent (PR = 1.22; 95%CI: 1.10-1.35) and among drinkers (PR = 1.50; 95%CI: 1.42-1.58). Those who were sputum smear-positive (PR = 1.11; 95%CI: 1.03-1.19) or for whom sputum smear was unperformed (PR = 1.30; 95%CI: 1.20-1.40), coinfection (PR = 2.04; CI95%: 1.89-2.21) and who were not submitted to serology (PR = 1.62; 95%CI: 1.53-1.71) have also a higher prevalence of tuberculosis treatment abandonment. Conclusion: Tuberculosis treatment abandonment is associated to biological and social factors, habits, and health service structure. DESCRIPTORS Tuberculosis; Treatment Refusal; Epidemiology; Cross-Sectional Studies.

Fiscal agencies have been facing several challenges regarding the legitimate exercise of professions. In particular, the context of medicine exercise poses as a crucial one, since the professionals involved in this field are responsible for dealing with the health of third parties. However, we may notice a number of incidents and frauds related to the professionals records of physicians, such as issuing forged diplomas or availability of information not validated. In order to avoid these frauds, one can highlight the relevance of investigating innovative solutions aiming to maintain in a safe and transparent way the professional history of each doctor. In this context, our objective and major contribution is to present MIRIAM, a blockchain-based web application based on the Hyperledger platform, that allows, in a decentralized and reliable fashion, the storage of relevant information necessary for managing registrations of medical professionals. In addition, we explored the Brazilian regulatory framework to clarify the solution's feasibility in a real-world workflow scenario.

Soft skills are not trivial to be taught, although they are preponderant to be improved during the academic experience of future software engineers. Understanding how such skills are perceived and practiced during the supervised internship poses to be relevant, given the opportunity for students to enhance their skills. Grounded on the Practice Theory, we investigate how the organization of soft skills occurs as a bundle of cooperative practices in the context of the Federal University of Ceará (Campus de Crateús) internship environment. We highlight as contributions i) the proposition of a conceptual model for investigating cooperative practices; ii) the analytical contrast between doings and sayings and iii) the empirical reflection for students on the role of soft skills.

The practical understanding of software measurement proves to be relevant for students’ awareness of quality assurance. However, aligning theory and practice in teaching such a discipline is challenging, thus requiring collaborative and engaging methodologies. This study proposes a framework, called GQM+PA, that merges Action Research method with the Goal-Question-Metric process for teaching software measurement. From a qualitative and quantitative perspective, multiple case studies were evaluated at the Federal University of Ceará (Campus Crateús). The results reveal that students were able to improve their knowledge and empirically perceive the value of software measurement, including software metrics and GQM

Casual mobile games represent an essential segment of the digital games market due to their accessibility, public reach, and democratization of the development process. However, creating a digital game is complex and multidisciplinary, where challenges commonly emerge during the development process. Thus, sharing and discussing the insights and lessons learned from projects under development with the community becomes relevant and insightful. Through a case study, this paper reports the development process of Murphy, a casual, mobile, and roguelike game, built with the Unity platform. In addition to providing rich detail on the ideation, storytelling and level design stages, we contribute towards a technical contextualization on the adoption of specific technologies, especially Unity, that we expect to be useful for other casual game developers and researchers.

Off-chain strategies based on distributed storage systems have been approached towards overcoming blockchain’s scalability issues. Despite both academic and market relevance, we identified a research gap regarding the performance comparison between the well-known IPFS, Sia, and Swarm systems. Given this opportunity, we carried out a pioneer experimental evaluation aiming to contribute to the aggregation of information that could support the decision of adopting off-chain solutions. We concluded that each system stood out in different ways, depending on the project’s particularities and the evaluated metrics.