Those who know her also know that she runs for the pleasure of it and that, perhaps because of that, she is never tired. Rute Almeida is a researcher at CINTESIS/Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto, in the group PaCeIT: Patient-Centered Innovation and Technologies. Her job matches perfectly with what she always dreamed of doing: using and generating knowledge to solve problems, in a real context.

She was born in Porto, on September 11, 1979. She studied also in Porto, the Invicta City. The daughter of a nurse who worked shifts, she spent most of her childhood at her grandmother’s house in Aldoar. She says her first years were “very normal”. She always liked school and reading and started writing and reading very early.

“It’s such a shame that I don’t have more time to read. When I was a child I used to read everything I found at home. My grandfather had a bookstore and he often took me with him to work. During the vacations, I would sit in a corner of the bookstore and spend my time there,” she recalls.

She wanted to be “many things”. She dreamed of being a teacher so she could teach others, but her heart fell for mathematics.  “It didn’t cross my mind to do research. I think until I was 17 I didn’t even know what that was”, she confesses, with the smile and authenticity that characterize her so well.

In 1996, at the age of 17, she was accepted to the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Porto (FCUP) to study Mathematics Applied to Technology. She was always the youngest in her class. Despite her young age, four years into her undergraduate studies she began teaching. It was during her degree that she discovered research, particularly in the health area. She completed her degree in 2000 and did her curricular internship at the University Hospital Center of São João (UHCSJ) in biomedical data analysis and processing, specifically of electrocardiograms. A collaboration that would continue over time.

The next step was the European Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at FCUP, with a four-year scholarship from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), in the same line of research, i.e. biomedical signal processing. After her Ph.D., in 2007, she was invited to join, as a researcher, the team of the Biomedical Research Center in Bioengineering, Biomaterials and Biomedicine, in Zaragoza, Spain.

She returned to Portugal in 2012, directly to the Mathematics Center of the University of Porto. “My coming back to Portugal was for personal reasons. My oldest son, who was four years old, was already speaking Spanish. I wanted my two children to study in Portugal,” she says.

But Ruth wanted more. “CINTESIS was part of my return plan. I made several attempts to collaborate with researchers from CINTESIS and the UHCSJ, both in intensive care and fetal well-being. Even before I was formally at CINTESIS, this approach already existed. I felt that CINTESIS reflected much more this way of seeing science as a tool to solve a societal problem than the places where I had been. That’s what I was looking for: to do good science, yes, but applied science,” she says.

She began working at CINTESIS/FMUP by the end of 2016, via the project NanoSTIMA – Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing: Towards Integrated Multimodal Health Monitoring and Analytics, as a post-doctoral fellow. From cardiorespiratory signals with emphasis on the cardiac part, she began to focus mainly on respiratory diseases. At that time, there were several projects that were being started or were underway that she ended up following-up. She has been part of the PaCeIT research group since its inception in 2018. Today, she works essentially in two main groups of projects for the development and validation of mobile technologies to support chronically ill patients: INSPIRERS and AIRDOC.

She explains that the project INSPIRERS includes mINSPIRERS, Adherence-HTN, and the apps InspirerMundi (and its Spanish version Código+), Arcade Inspirers, and Inspirers-HTN. The mINSPIRERS, developed within the FCT, focuses on monitoring adherence to therapy and asthma control, namely through monitoring adherence to inhaled medications. The InspirerMundi app is being tested, and a randomized study is planned to evaluate its use in people with the disease. Recently, this project was extended to monitoring adherence to therapy and control of hypertension, namely blood pressure measurement, with the Inspirers-HTN app, through Adherence-HTN.

Another major PaCeIT project she is working on is AIRDOC, led by MEDIDA, a spin-off from the University of Porto funded by NORTE 2020, in partnership with the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) and part of an ITEA-3 project – PHE (Personal Health Empowerment). The goal is to support people with chronic respiratory diseases, enabling self-monitoring and disease self-management, as well as information sharing with health professionals and coaching. The system integrates a mobile application, which is already being used in studies, an interface for health professionals, and a database of breathing sounds that will also allow this line to be enhanced.

From statistical data analysis and signal processing, Rute Almeida started to dedicate herself also to image analysis and processing (such as photographs taken with her cell phone camera for recognition of inhaler dosimeters). She accepted the challenge of doing and learning “new things” within a larger multidisciplinary team.

“This multidisciplinarity is very important and very unusual. Usually, there are communication difficulties between people with such different backgrounds. We were able to build this bridge because people from the technological areas are very used to working with health professionals and vice-versa. This facilitates the results and, above all, the validation of what is done”, she concludes.

1-Year Ambition
My goal is to continue to collaborate on these projects and try to make these products and tools available in healthcare practice. The breath sounds database will strengthen this line of research.

10-Year Ambition
The idea is to promote other projects that can incorporate our ecosystem and continue the analysis and processing of breath sound and other data that can be collected with the cell phone, either with the camera or the microphone, taking real advantage of these potentialities. This is a niche that can be strengthened. CINTESIS is the ideal place to do this, because of its multidisciplinarity. We have resources, within the group and in other groups, both on the technological side and on the health professional side, to create tools that can be useful to patients and health professionals in the real world.

Life Beyond Research
I do a lot of things, many more than I should [laughs]. I steal a lot of hours from sleep, that’s a fact. Something that I love and that I am prevented from doing, because of the pandemic, is hiking. I have always hiked, both in Portugal and in Spain. In the last few years I have discovered the fantastic charm of bird watching. It’s very good because I keep on walking, but now with more calm and tranquility and more concentration on my surroundings. This is the opposite of my daily life, where I am always in a hurry.

I am a mother of two children and I need to dedicate time to the family. I am also very active in parents’ associations as a member of the social bodies. I run an online support group for mothers who are breastfeeding. I am a catechist and I collaborate with the Diocesan Secretariat for Christian Education in Porto.

When someone talks to me about a given problem, my impulse is to ask how I can help. I feel much happier if it’s something I don’t know well and I have to learn about it! In fact, that’s one of the charms of researching: we are always learning!