Search

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 begun to make use of it. This paper introduces an application developed to improve patient monitoring and motivation through the use of gamification. We have applied the mechanics and dynamics of games in a non-game context, such as the introduction of data for health monitoring, in order to attract the patient. With the use of gamification, we make the introduction of data less tedious and, in addition, increase levels of motivation, as a further benefit. In this work we have conducted a user study aimed at evaluating the usability of gamification. We also studied the resources that encourage patients to use the application and how to increase their motivation and satisfaction. The results show that the app is easy to use. Second, they show that we implemented a scalable and self-recursive system. Finally, these results indicate that our system for resources sharing is a system in which patients feel comfortable when sharing and receiving those resources and they encourage us for further developments and studies based on the feedback received.

The term affective computing was coined twenty years ago to refer to computers human-like capabilities to detect and recognize user’s emotions. Mobile sensing systems can be used to sense the emotional state of one or more users and let a third-party can use this information to produce changes in the user’s emotional state, or analyze hundreds of thousands of pictures, gestures, speechs and so on of people and train recognition systems for affective computing applications. For example teachers or e-learning systems as third-party systems can react appropriately maintaining motivation for their students according their emotional states using augmented reality techniques or changing the multimedia resources used in the lectures. Despite the direct benefits of knowing the emotional states, people in general is opposed to a system captures their emotions with smart phones equipped with built-in or external sensors such as image sensor to capture images and record videos, or a pressure sensor to detect the force or rhythm of a finger or stylus pen strokes within the display area. For that reason, currently privacy is one of the important barrier that limits the social acceptance of mobile sensing systems to do affective computing. In this paper we focus on mobile sensing systems to do affective computing preserving the user’s privacy to motivate the users to be sensed.

Sensing technologies in mobile devices play a key role in reducing the gapbetween the physical and the digital world. The use of automatic identification capabilitiescan improve user participation in business processes where physical elements are involved(Smart Workflows). However, identifying all objects in the user surroundings does notautomatically translate into meaningful services to the user. This work introduces Parkour,an architecture that allows the development of services that match the goals of each ofthe participants in a smart workflow. Parkour is based on a pluggable architecture thatcan be extended to provide support for new tasks and technologies. In order to facilitatethe development of these plug-ins, tools that automate the development process are alsoprovided. Several Parkour-based systems have been developed in order to validate theapplicability of the proposal.