Proceedings, Volume 31, Issue 1

Character recognizers have generally focused on printed text on paper with an emphasis on generality rather than speed. This makes the proposed algorithms not applicable in the context of the very high-speed industrial validation of expiration codes...

Research and development often move forward based on buzzwords. New terms are coined to summarize new developments, often with several interpretations and without a formal definition. The term Smart Education has been coined to represent a move forwa...

A taxonomic proposal based on dimensions and items that reflects the preferences in Data Science visualizations for domain users in tourism and road transport is presented. The needs transmitted by domain users are grouped into dimensions esthetics,...

Activity recognition is an important task in many fields, such as ambient intelligence, pervasive healthcare, and surveillance. In particular, the recognition of human gait can be useful to identify the characteristics of the places or physical space...

Smart Education requires bridging formal and informal learning experience. However, how to create contextualized learning resources that support this bridging remains a problem. In this paper, we propose to exploit the open data available in the Web...

Mobile health technologies are becoming more common to assist older people in independent living and self-management of illnesses. Although many mobile health technologies can be beneficial to older users, there remains a dearth of evidence-informed...

Taking into account the dynamics of a human body in its daily movement, one can study the forces that are generated in its variations with respect to a normal walk. These forces can be reduced, generating an opposite force through some device if one...

Thanks to the advances of the Internet of Things (IoTs), more and more wireless sensor networks applications have been realized. One of the fundamental but crucial applications is the continuous monitoring of environmental factors including temperatu...

Commercial activity trackers are increasingly being used to support healthcare research. While their accuracy has been questioned, they do provide more precise information on some parameters relevant to wellbeing than self-report, such as steps walke...

Maintaining high cognitive activity is vital for the mental health of seniors. Taking part in leisure activities is an exciting and gratifying way to accomplish this, with video games having several advantages for this use. The present study is a wor...

During recent decades, the elderly population has grown rapidly, and the number of patients with chronic heart-related diseases has exploded. Many of them (e.g., congestive heart failure, some types of arrhythmia) require close medical supervision, i...

In this text, we describe the developed system for Body Surface Potential Mapping (BSPM) signals preprocessing and basic processing. The BSPM is based on multichannel ECG measurement with up to hundreds of electrodes in a specific grid on the body su...

Motivated by the need to improve communication between grandparents and grandchildren who are geographically separated, this paper presents the redesign and evaluation of AffectiVest, a wearable affective device that allows the transmission of affect...

The study of cognitive responses and processes while using applications is a critical field in human–computer interaction. This paper aims to determine the mental effort required for different typical tasks with smartphones. Mental effort is ty...

The response conducted by emergency units after natural disasters, such as earthquakes, has to be coordinated, fast, and efficient in order to rescue and care for the victims, keeping all the population—and the units themselves—safe amids...

People’s health care cost prediction is nowadays a valuable tool to improve accountability in health care. In this work, we study if an interpretable method can reach the performance of black-box methods for the problem of predicting health care cost...

Embodied agents, such as avatars and social robots, are increasingly incorporating a capacity to enact affective states and recognize the mood of their interlocutor. This influences how users perceive these technologies and how they interact with the...

Free play is of great benefit for children’s physical and cognitive development, especially for younger ages. However, children with motor restrictions cannot engage in free play like their peers because they face strong challenges to manipulat...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) constitutes a neurodegenerative pathology that presents mobility disorders as one of its earliest symptoms. Current smartphones integrate accelerometers that can be used to collect mobility data of Alzheimer’s pat...

Nowadays, gamification offers several advantages in order to motivate a change in the behavior towards health and wellness. Although it is a relatively new trend, many fields have already realized its potential, and those related to health have also...

Augmented reality is showing a continuous evolution due to the increasing number of smart glasses that are being used for different applications (e.g. training, marketing, industry, risk avoidance, etc.). In this paper, we present an implementation t...

There are currently many applications to assist in navigating urban spaces. However, in underserved regions where even the most essential urban infrastructure is lacking, these applications are not appropriate either because the zone has not been pro...

The rising popularity of the Internet of Things (IoT) has led to a plethora of highly heterogeneous, geographically dispersed devices. In recent years, IoT platforms have been used to provide a variety of services to applications such as device disco...

Active learning is very useful for classification problems where it is hard or time-consuming to acquire classes of data in order to create a subset for training a classifier. The classification of over-night polysomnography records to sleep stages i...

Pressure ulcers affect the quality of life and health level of patients while causing a cost increase for the health system. Despite all of this, there is no monitoring system for this disease, even though it is very common in hospitalized patients....

Teaching programming in Primary Education has recently attracted a great deal of research interest. One global trend is using multimedia languages such as Scratch. However, it was our belief that by using Pedagogic Conversational Agents that dialog w...

Ambient displays can play an important role in the teaching process guiding students to perform learning activities in public spaces. In the last years, automated feedback is becoming popular due to the proliferation of sensors, actuators, mobile dev...

During the last decade some technologies have achieved the necessary maturity to allow the widespread emergence of Virtual Worlds; many people are living an alternative life in them. One objective of this paper is to argue that the blending of real a...

The Internet of things (IoT) is characterized by billions of heterogeneous, distributed, and intelligent objects—both from the digital and the physical worlds—running applications and services. Objects are connected through heterogeneous...

Addressing how human behaviour can be taken into account when designing for sustainability is an emerging topic in the development of pro-environmental person-centred smart systems. Indeed, user diversity and categorisation in the context of sustaina...

The best Open Educational Resources (OER) for each final user can be hard to find. OER come from lots of sources, in many different formats, conforming to a diverse logical structure and each user may present different objectives depending on their r...

There is a huge demand for new techniques and technologies to tackle life-threatening in fire emergencies. Enclosure fires are a type of emergency involving firefighters whose lives are sometimes put at risk. In any confined fire, the emergency team...

Logistics and transport have become an increasingly important topic in recent years. In this kind of scenario, being able to offer added value to users means an important improvement in the services offered by the different companies. Different actor...

Physical rehabilitation of patients affected by neurological diseases is currently an unmet clinical need due to the high cost of health systems and the impact that rehabilitation has on patients and their families. This paper introduces an approach...

The school of computing, in collaboration with the institute of nursing and health research and the school of engineering, recently established the connected health living lab (CH:LL) at Ulster University. CH:LL offers a dedicated environment to sup...

Market research is important because every company wants to stand out from their competitors. However, there are well-known weaknesses of traditional market research methods. This research presents a virtual reality system that aims to improve the qu...

The existing technologies, systems, or models in the hospital system, in certain aspects have, in terms of integrity, difficulties in carrying out an adequate, systematic, and automated record of patient data. To this end, the electronic health recor...

Standardized questionnaires are one of the methods used to evaluate User Experience (UX). Standardized questionnaires are composed of an invariable group of questions that users answer themselves after using a product or system. They are considered r...

Timing requirements are present in many current context-aware and ambient intelligent applications. These kinds of applications usually demand a timing response according to needs dealing with context changes and user interactions. The current work i...

During the “Day of the Dead” celebration in México, altars are installed to commemorate the dead in different places, such as schools’ libraries. To preserve this cultural tradition, students visit them to know about the mean...

In road-based mass transit systems, the travel time is a key factor affecting quality of service. For this reason, to know the behavior of this time is a relevant challenge. Clustering methods are interesting tools for knowledge modeling because thes...

Generating mobile apps represents a big challenge in several areas, such as considering audience needs, adapting their user interfaces to such needs, dealing with design constraints or using different development technologies. The present work seeks...

By using techniques such as the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) and video capture, this paper evaluated the performance of the Nao Robot in the role of a personal assistant, which was valuated alongside the impact of the assigned gender (male/female) in the perce...

The design and creation of groupware tools is a complex task that usually requires the participation of different stakeholders (software engineers, designers, etc.), either working at the same time or collaborating asynchronously. This paper describe...

The intelligent smart assistants are becoming more interactive and helpful for everyday tasks. The Amazon Echo has potential for advanced voice interactions and as a tool for conducting complex tasks. The potential of the Amazon Echo in the area of b...

The current paradigm of intelligent transport systems (ITS) is based on the continuous observation of what is happening in the transport network and the continuous processing of data coming from these observations. This implies the handling and proce...

Nowadays, more than one billion people are in need of one or more assistive technologies, and this number is expected to increase beyond two billion by 2050. The majority of assistive technologies are supported by battery-operated devices like smartp...

Some ethical evaluation models for Intelligent Assistive Technologies (IATs) have been presented in the literature. However, it has been proven that the vast majority of IATs were designed in the absence of explicit ethical values and considerations....

Social networks, instant messaging applications, smartphones and the Internet are the main technological tools used by adolescents for communication. While they can benefit from those tools, they can also be used as a weapon for harassment. Cyberbull...

Internet of Things (IoT) is witnessing an increasing range of application domains (industry 4.0, eHealth, smart city, etc.). Meanwhile, IoT is still facing communication challenges because of limited capabilities in computing, storage and energy cons...