The offshore work environment is, many times, aggressive and with extreme conditions, mainly taking into account the submerged work, which is done by professional divers who, in addition to performing high risk services, are subjected to low temperature conditions, high pressure, low lighting, low oxygenation and difficult to access and rescue in case of an accident or medical emergency. In addition, this work has few vital support resources, making the development of a monitoring system with risk classification and vital alert is essential to avoid accidents, especially in submerged work. This happens because conditions of stress and anxiety change the physiological behavior of workers and, added to the adverse environment, can lead to changes in the limits and patterns of normality of the organism. The present work aims to create a database and a health profile of offshore divers, in order to develop a system of vital alerts for the suggestion of interruption of a certain task, avoiding a possible accident that can lead to death.

- This full paper addresses an innovative practice in the experimental teaching/learning in Engineering courses. Engineering is a practical profession where doing is the key. Experimental work and the immersing in the lab environment (hands-on, simulations, remote labs) helps students to construct and strengthen their knowledge. The VISIR+ Project (ERASMUS+), launched in November 2015 and concluded in Abril 2018, intended to disseminate VISIR - Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (the most used remote lab in electric and electronics area of expertise) in Latin American countries (Argentina and Brazil) by installing a system in five Higher Educational Institutions. It involved 13 educational institutions, 25 different courses, several of them with successive didactical implementations. It comprised 49 teachers and 1,595 students. During the project about 27 research papers were published disseminating the projects' results. At the end of the project, the expectations were that the impact could remain in the long-term promoting VISIR remote lab and the dissemination of good practices. The project ended four years ago, and each installed VISIR system continued to promote teaching diversification using different experimental resources (including VISIR) then contributing to student learning. The aim of this work is to understand the impact of these didactical practices while using VISIR in these last years. This study was based on a questionnaire complemented with an interview with each person of contact. The results point to an increase of VISIR's usage in almost all institutions, particularly during the pandemic period. Overall, the educational impact involved more than 23 different institutions, 45 courses (most of them with several editions), 118 teachers and 4,866 students. The impact in the scientific community implied additional 31 publications with VISIR as its main core. These numbers support the sustainability of the VISIR+ project over the years, positively contributing to a more diversified engineering education of these students and their experimental competences development.

Monitoring technology is becoming more compact every day. This contributes to the increased use of wearable technologies in various sectors, both aimed at healthcare and performance rating. As it takes place in an aggressive and difficult to access environment, especially when an accident occurs, offshore work increasingly requires the use of these types of devices to assist in the diagnosis and prevention of accidents. The present work aimed to develop, test and validate a wearable equipment for monitoring bio-signals in submerged offshore work activities. This study used the equipment developed to monitor different biological signals from divers in order to avoid possible accidents at work. The various test steps were detailed until the final version of the prototype was drawn up, as well as the ergonomic adaptation of the device to the divers' working clothes. In addition, the entire work methodology performed will be described.

Control courses are important parts of the curricula of Control & Automation Engineering and Electrical Engineering. In this area, as in Engineering curricula in general, experimentation is of paramount importance. Engineering curricula have always had many lab classes for students to perform experiments – lab classes were hosted in traditional brick and mortar environments. The current status of technology allows for experiments to remotely be performed. Remote Labs are used in many institutions over the world as well as Virtual Labs. Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, these solutions have gained greater importance. This work addresses the use of an Electric and Electronic Circuit Lab in a Control Course to perform Analog Simulations. It introduces the characteristics of the Remote Lab as well as the way it was used to enhance the learning of systems of different natures. This Remote Lab had been in use at the institution since the second semester of 2016 but in Electric Circuits and General Electricity courses. The Institution has been implementing other Remote Labs too. This work focuses the school years of 2020 and 2021, and addresses the plans for the near future. The main topics to be discussed are: the context at the University, the Control Course, the technological tools that have been in use for many years and how Remote Labs in general have been used. VISIR – Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality, the Remote Lab for Electric and Electronic Circuits is briefly described.

Patients with hemiplegia (partial or total paralysis of one side of the body), usually caused by a stroke, have a slow and gradual recovery performed by physiotherapy and electrical stimulation. This paper presents a brief history of the progress of functional electrical stimulation for the control of human arm with hemiplegia.The goal of this article is to decrease the angular error of the bending (flexing) movement by using several control techniques, such as fuzzy controllers, neurofuzzy, adaptive, Extremum Seeking Control (ESC), the recent discoveries in nonlinear modeling of the muscular system, as well as two reviews of a neural controller and other advances in therapy for Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES).

This work presents a study of the planar model of movement performed by a human arm with hemiplegia, being actuated through an electro stimulus, with the aim to reduce the angular error of the same movement using techniques of adaptive control and genetic algorithm-based control and comparing with an Integral Proportional Controller. The verification and validation of the proposed methodology are carried out by using a simulation of a eletrostimulation device compared with a given angle reference, aiming regulation.

In recent years, the use of mobile robots in agriculture has increased significantly because of their capability to carry out agricultural tasks in a safe and efficient manner, with limited or without human intervention. Crop monitoring and inspection have become an important part of precision agriculture, supporting farmers in the management of insect pests, weeds and diseases in order to reduce costs and losses. In this work, we present the design and development of an autonomous mobile robot, conceived to perform routine monitoring and inspection tasks on soy and cotton crops. The robot design is similar to a differential-drive vehicle due to its simplicity of construction, modeling and control. The autonomous navigation is successfully carried out via the use of odometry and cameras properly attached to the robot structure. Preliminary field tests with the prototype operating on a cotton farm are presented to show the performance and feasibility of the electro-mechanical design for navigation in row crops.