The present paper is related to laboratory quality in the Brazilian health care sector in general and to public health services in particular. Its purpose is to contribute to the development of reliable measurement practices in the hospital care section within the scope of at least 4 basic aspects: (i) identification of the available metrology legislation in Brazil which, as a rule, is sparsely organized and is not easily accessible to the enduser/ practitioner, whose bibliographical research reveals an explicit lack of specialized literature; (ii) analysis of the compiled measurement standards and recommendations for the sector; (iii) diagnosis of laboratory quality in Central Public Health Care Laboratories as a means by which to implement an alternative strategy for introducing a quality system in a public health care laboratory based on a new approach that focuses on the quality of the laboratories that comprise the National Network of Official Quality and Health Care Control Laboratories; (iv) diagnosis of instruments that are employed in hospital services in terms of their conformity to measurement standards based on case studies of scales for controlling the mass of neonates, and of biomedical instruments for measuring blood pressure.

A method for design of the switching mode lock-in bioimpedance measurement unit is proposed. The unit is foreseen to use in implantable medical devices for making medical experiments in vivo. The solution is aimed to lessen the errors caused due to sensitivity of the switching mode lock-in signal converters to the odd higher harmonics of an input signal. The applied method is similar to pulse width modulation (PWM), and it is oriented to achieve minimal complexity and low energy consumption.

Dc-operated radiation thermometers, due to their high-speed response, simple and rigid optical and electrical systems are widely used in industry and science. Practically, in all metrology laboratories the realization and dissemination of the temperature scale (by means of radiation temperature) is carried out using the dc-operated transfer standard radiation thermometers. Therefore, the actuality of the accurate characterization of all aspects of the pyrometer system is evidently clear.
This paper describes the systematic error contribution of the gain non-linearity of well-designed preamplifiers in the signal processing of the dc-operated radiation thermometers.

Pyrometry is the only way to obtain temperature measurements when performing fast (µs duration) experiments on metals up to and above their melting points. Converting the pyrometer signals to true temperatures requires some knowledge about the normal spectral emissivity of the target at the operating wavelength of the pyrometer. Because dynamic emissivity measurements are rather difficult, one often has to resort to assumptions about the temperature and wavelength dependence of emissivity instead of a direct measurement. The HAGEN–RUBENS relation between the normal spectral emissivity of a metal and its electrical resistivity can be helpful in making such assumptions. In this work, a method for obtaining good estimates of the normal spectral emissivity of metals and alloys above their melting points as a function of temperature, based on the HAGEN-RUBENS relation, is presented. Its usefulness is examined by comparing results derived from it to actual emissivity data on several liquid metals and alloys that were measured using a pulse-heating technique.

In the paper the comparison of the realisation of the freezing point of indium inside the three-zone furnace and the fluidised powder furnace is presented. The emphasis of the paper is given to the comparison of the metrological characteristics of the realisations such as time duration of the plateau and the width of the plateau. The same fixed-point cell (closed fixed-point cell, serial number In 86, made by Isotech) was realised in both furnaces. Also the analysis of the immersion curve is performed in order to see how it agrees with the expected curve.