João Ramos

• PhD
• University of Minho

Competitiveness is a term that is very present in companies across several activity sectors. To keep higher competitive levels, product’s quality and customer service are a must. Indeed, by establishing a contract with a client that encompass a delivery (physical product or software), it is important to comply with the contract. As such, a good for...

Virtual reality and augmented reality have the potential to enhance and widespread practical learning environments in professional courses efficiently in a cost-efficient manner by limiting the costs of real resources substituting them with fixed costs from.VR/AR applications with virtual resources. There are advantages in the learning process, as...

Gamification is a topic which aims to apply game elements to real world tasks, that results in a pleasant influence over a user behaviour towards an objective. Learning is one of the fields where gamification has been implemented and experimented to motivate students and improve their learning process. The first iterations account for the use of ga...

The world is changing, and Sars-Cov-2 has accelerated this process. Education was severely affected by countries emergency state where most students had remote classes. This change of the paradigm (for most of the students) affected students’ motivation and teacher failed to assess the real students’ knowledge. Pervasive Gaming has demonstrated to...

The well-being of a person has been increasingly valued in the present, whether this is related to motor, physical or even psychological development. To help the correct evolution of these main areas there are clinics or therapeutic centres that offer interventions in several areas such as speech therapy, occupational therapy, psychology, psychomot...

With the expected increase of the population that lives in the urban cities, the concept of a smart city is becoming more concrete due to the necessity of adaptation, considering its sustainability and competitiveness. The hope is that modern society will be able to deal with the multitude of issues that urban inhabitants are already facing, which...

The traditional keyboard has been replaced by tactile screens or other types of implicit interfaces. An example of such interface is the Microsoft Kinect system, which makes use of a depth sensing system to enable the user-machine interaction. Allied to the physical activity, this hardware may be used to track and monitor the user when he/she is ex...

Nowadays, electronics can be found in almost every available device. At the core of electronic devices there are Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). To create a suitable PCB there is the need of complying with several constraints, both concerning electrical and layout design. Thus, the design rules related to the PCB manufacturing and assembly are very i...

Once a person is diagnosed (or a caregiver suspects that the person may have) cognitive disabilities he may lose the state of being autonomous, which may range from partial to total loss of independence, according to the level of incidence. Smart houses may be used as a tentative solution to overcome this situation. However, when one goes outside t...

The increase of the elderly population has an enormous effect on the health care system of a country, as the rise of this population sets the mood to an exponential growth in assistance and care. Indeed, the inherent costs of this populational class are higher when comparing to the younger classes. Today paradigm focuses on the reduction of these c...

Given the high importance and complexity of the evaluation of Information Technology (IT) projects, it is essential that companies define and implement systematic processes for managing success aiming to improve project management and deliverables performance. This article presents the first stage of the implementation of a success management proce...

The pervasiveness of location based services such the GPS on mobile devices enabled the gathering of massive spatial-temporal data. These databases enabled the mining of new data in order to calculate frequent patterns and predict the movement of the objects. In the development of our system for guiding the user with cognitive disabilities (CogHelp...

Nowadays, progress is constant and inherent to a living society. This may occur in different arenas, namely in mathematical evaluation and healthcare. Assistive technologies are a topic under this evolution, being extremely important in helping users with diminished capabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual). These technologies assist people in...

Assistive technologies help users with disabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual) to perform tasks that were difficult or impossible to execute. Thus, the user autonomy is increased through this technology. Although some adaptation of the user might be needed, the effort should be minimum in order to use devices that convey assistive functional...

The role of assistive technologies is to help users with diminished capabilities in the fulfillment of their everyday tasks. One of such tasks is orientation. It is crucial for the autonomy of an individual and, at the same time, it is one of the most challenging tasks for an individual with cognitive disabilities. Existing solutions that tackle th...

The current progresses at the intersection of computer science and health care have the potential of greatly improving the living conditions of people with disabilities by removing obstacles that impair the normal unfolding of their everyday lives. Assistive technologies, as an application of scientific knowledge, aim to help users with their dimin...

Technology is now part of everyone’s life, being widespread and present in the most innocuous objects, making people able to benefit from several technological solutions that only a few years ago were impossible to be implemented. For instance, the smartphone is one example of this type of technology. Usually, this device is equipped with several s...

Progress is inherent to a living society, which may occur in several different areas (e.g. computation, healthcare) and manners. The present (or now) is the time that is associated with the events perceived directly and in the first time, making, for example, the society to be very inquisitive on assistive technologies and how they may improve the...

Technology is present in almost every simple aspect of the people’s daily life. As an instance, let us refer to the smartphone. This device is usually equipped with a GPS modulewhich may be used as an orientation system, if it carries the right functionalities. The problem is that these applications may be complex to operate and may not be within t...

In health care there has been a growing interest and investment in new tools to have a constant monitoring of patients. The increasing of average life expectation and, consequently, the costs in health care due to elderly population are the motivation for this investment.However, health monitoring is not only important to elderly people, it can be...