Paula Maria Escudeiro- PhD
- Research Director at Polytechnic Institute of Porto
Paula Maria Escudeiro
- PhD
- Research Director at Polytechnic Institute of Porto
Coordinator Professor at ISEP/P.PORTO GILT Director at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto
About
177
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Introduction
Paula Maria Escudeiro currently works at the DEI, Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. Paula does research in Educational Technology, Assistive Technology, Serious Games, Computer Graphics, Human-computer Interaction. Their current project is ACE project.
Current institution
Publications
Publications (177)
Communication across languages, particularly between deaf and hearing individuals, presents significant challenges. Traditional translation tools, while helpful, often fail to fully address the diverse needs of these users. This paper introduces Figure Out, a mobile application designed to provide real-time translations of text captured from images...
The gaming industry has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, with inclusivity emerging as a core value in the development of new games. Despite these efforts, there remains a gap in the inclusivity of visually impaired individuals in gaming. This paper seeks to address this gap by asking: How can game design enhance colour perceptio...
The field of education is increasingly recognizing the importance of fostering students’ abilities through project-based learning across disciplines. To address the challenges faced by teachers, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics, and Entrepreneurship (STEAME) fields, the STEAME Teacher Facilitators Academy project is...
With the increasing number of elderly individuals in the Portuguese population and the consequent rise in cognitive decline associated with normal aging, there is a growing need to invest in mental health. This investment can be realized through the promotion of active aging and cognitive stimulation. Developing interactive tools that provide stimu...
In a world marked by pervasive challenges, individuals with visual and motor disabilities encounter multifaceted obstacles that hinder their daily lives. The prevailing issue lies in the absence of holistic and inclusive design solutions capable of addressing the diverse needs of this demographic. The VR4ALL project addresses these pressing challen...
In the realm of education, deaf students face significant communication barriers that limit their integration and success within intellectual communities. Due to the use of distinct mother languages, a communication gap arises between deaf and non-deaf communities. This poses serious difficulties for deaf students, who communicate primarily in sign...
The ATHENA European University is an alliance of nine Higher Education Institutions with the mission of fostering excellence in research and innovation by facilitating international cooperation. The ATHENA acronym stands for Advanced Technologies in Higher Education Alliance. The partner institutions are from France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Lithuan...
Technology builds upon the available literature in equity and inclusion through educational technology while providing further research opportunities in this dynamic and growing field. It provides the opportunity for reflection on this crucial issue by increasing the understanding of the importance of inclusion and equity in the context of educatio...
Promoting equity and social and educational inclusion of disabled people is a priority of European Education. Disabled students often feel challenged to communicate or access information. However, with the emergence of new technologies, disabled students are offered more chances to have the same learning opportunities as others. Our current work co...
In recent times, disabled, incoming, and Erasmus students have encountered challenges in their initial days at the University. These challenges often stem from communication or assistance difficulties, necessitating new solutions to aid them. InDoor Mapping is one such solution; it is an assistive technology that serves as a guide and navigation sy...
Modern societies prioritize sustainability, emphasizing the importance of intergenerational care and education to encourage recycling habits and social responsibility. To raise awareness of recycling and environmental sustainability, the Eco Tetris game was developed to enhance the learning process. This game builds upon the well-known Tetris game...
Tourism is one important engine of economy worldwide accounting for significant shares of gross product and employment in many countries. The touristic sector faces several challenges such as stimulating off-peak touristic offer, the valorization of people, assuring accessibility and mobility conditions for all, expanding the tourism offer to cover...
Tourist activity has grown to be of extreme importance for a country’s economy, notably in several countries like Portugal, where the tourism sector accounts for over 15% of the national GDP. As of this moment, ensuring that our country has conditions to welcome and assist every tourist interested in our cultural heritage tourism while offering equ...
![Figure 1. Stages in the inclusive MOOC approach and respective roles [18].](publication/372307452/figure/fig1/AS:11431281174249099@1689175038690/Stages-in-the-inclusive-MOOC-approach-and-respective-roles-18_Q320.jpg)
![Figure 2. Design solution of the MOOC for the deaf [18].](publication/372307452/figure/fig2/AS:11431281174285340@1689175039188/Design-solution-of-the-MOOC-for-the-deaf-18_Q320.jpg)
Blind and deaf people face communication barriers constantly. In academia, these barriers generate particularly serious blocking factors preventing people facing blindness and deafness from progressing within the wider intellectual communities as most digital content and tools used for disseminating information remain inaccessible to them. Our work...
This paper aims to explore consumer engagement with online retailers through gamification, the use of game mechanics, and co-creation. A qualitative methodology was used through an exploratory case study approach. The interviews were conducted with 30 Portuguese consumers. It was found that the majority of respondents do not consider online shoppin...
Understanding the meaning of technical terms is essential when using technical and scientific documentation, whether directed to education, research, or labour. In education settings, there is a need to provide clear definitions of terms, to use a glossary explaining the meaning of each technical term when introducing a new topic, and to align term...
Recycling has grown to be extremely relevant for the maintenance of our planet, but also for our well-being. Sustainability is a key issue in modern societies, relying on intergenerational care and education to promote recycling habits and social responsibility. Raising awareness towards recycling and healthy environmental habits, and motivating pe...
Individuals with hearing impairments face numerous obstacles when engaged in touristic activities or using infrastructure and services in touristic spots. When tourism is considered a social good of first necessity, new concerns arise and pressure for inclusion in the sector stimulates the advance of innovative solutions for inclusive tourism. Ther...
The communication gap between deaf and non-deaf communities arises due to the use of distinct mother languages. A deaf student, who used to communicate in sign language, cannot read fluently materials written in spoken language. This fact causes serious difficulties to deaf students since most didactic materials in higher education are available ex...
Objectives
To evaluate a workshop using a low-fidelity simulator for training vascular surgery residents in vascular anastomosis during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design
Prospective, controlled, single-center
Materials and Methods
Vascular surgery residents at São Paulo University Medical School were enrolled in the COVID Group (five PGY-3 residents)...
To je zbirno poročilo o delu, opravljenem v prvem intelektualnem rezultatu na temo izzivov v komunikaciji (angl. Intellectual Output One: Communication Challenges) za projekt Spodbujanje vključujočega izobraževanja z mednarodno kretnjo (ang. Advancing Inclusive Education Through International Sign) – InSign. To poročilo združuje in povzema rezultat...
The work described in this paper addresses the development of a game focused on a project developed as a teaching strategy in the context of action-research study aimed at testing the impact of the participation in a collaborative project. The project aimed to motivate student’s to use and learn foreign languages and also to develop their intercult...
Πρόκειται για μια ενοποιημένη έκθεση για τις δραστηριότητες που πραγματοποιήθηκαν στο πρώτο παραδοτέο (IO1) για το έργο “Advancing Inclusive Education Through International Sign – InSign”. Η έκθεση αυτή συνδυάζει και συνοψίζει τα αποτελέσματα που προέκυψαν από τις εθνικές εκθέσεις των εταίρων του έργου, από την Κύπρο, τη Γερμανία, την Ελλάδα, την Π...
Serious games have a great potential to help the population develop new skills or improve previously existing ones. However, part of the population does not have the means to play these games. Therefore, this article aims to discuss the use of serious games for deaf and blind people, as well as show the development of serious games inclusive, prese...
The paper presents the development of an inclusive serious multiplayer game with Morse code as its theme, as well as describing methodologies and architectures for developing a serious game through specific concepts for the deaf (sign language) and blind (audio description). The preceding case has three game modes: classic one versus one, a coopera...
Objective:
To externally validate community acquired pneumonia (CAP) tools on patients hospitalized with COVID-19 pneumonia from two distinct countries, and compare its performance to recently developed COVID-19 mortality risk stratification tools.
Methods:
We evaluated 11 risk stratification scores in a binational retrospective cohort of patien...
Resumo: Na contemporaneidade os alunos que vivenciam as culturas digitais estão acostumados ao ciberespaço, a instantaneidade das redes sociais, a ludicidade dos jogos digitais e a busca por informação na Internet. No entanto, na sala de aula percebe-se a falta de motivação e de engajamento dos alunos, especialmente pela ausência de práticas pedagó...
Peer-to-peer communication has increasingly gained prevalence in people’s daily lives, with its widespread adoption being catalysed by technological advances. Although there have been strides for the inclusion of disabled individuals to ease communication between peers, people who suffer hand/arm impairments have scarce support in regular mainstrea...
Deaf students, who use sign language as their mother language, continuously experience difficulties to communicate with non-deaf in their daily lives. This is a severe handicap in education settings seriously jeopardizing deaf people chances to progress in their professional career. Deaf people’s comprehension of texts is limited due to grammar dif...
Os surdos encontram constantemente obstáculos na comunicação do dia-a-dia. Estes obstáculos tornam-se ainda mais relevantes em ambiente escolar, o que prejudica seriamente a hipótese de progressão profissional no futuro. Para os surdos, a compreensão de texto escrito é limitada devido às diferenças entre as línguas gestual e oral. É necessário melh...
Over the last years, there has been an increase in hearing-impaired students who use sign language as their main form of communication attending higher education institutions around the world. The knowledge that their comprehension of texts is reduced due to sentence structure differences causes a need for more solutions to improve communication an...
A correcção de respostas a perguntas em texto livre, no decorrer de um processo de avaliação, é uma tarefa demorada e sujeita a flutuações na aplicação dos critérios de avaliação, em particular quando o número de respostas é elevado (na ordem das centenas). Em consequência destas flutuações, inerentes à natureza humana e, em grande medida, determin...
This paper presents the evaluation methods and techniques applied to the serious game developed within the VirtualSign project as well as the results achieved through those methods. VirtualSign is a Portuguese sign language bi-directional translator with three main components. The components are a gesture to text translator, a text to gesture trans...
Modern economy requires engineers to excel in collaborative and communication skills at an international setting. However, these competences are not usually addressed in most engineering curricula. In the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work course, MUTW, students develop their capstone project as members of an international team while working at...
Massive and Open Online Courses (MOOCs) provide an opportunity to reach the target audience widely. To maximize its potential, a pedagogical model of MOOC in Educational Technologies was implemented at Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto (ISEP) to satisfy deaf and blind communities. These communities face many communication barriers, not allo...
With the rise of usage in digital content in education, deaf and blind communities face communication barriers which as a result makes education less inclusive. These barriers do not allow them to integrate within the larger scholarly communities as most tools used for information dissemination remain inaccessible to them. This paper presents BDC-A...
Deaf and blind students face communication barriers that are constantly present in their daily lives. These barriers arise naturally since the deaf community, the blind community and the rest of the students and teachers use different languages and different channels to communicate. These barriers have a significant impact in the academic, personal...
The ageing process is naturally accompanied by changes in people’s cognitive processes. The European population ageing is a challenge for the European social policy and for the mental health professionals. New technologies can play an important role in the neurocognitive stimulation area as they possess characteristics that might reduce the anxiety...
This paper presents the evaluation methods and techniques applied to the serious game developed within the VirtualSign project as well as the results achieved through those methods. VirtualSign is a Portuguese sign language bi-directional translator with three main components. The components are a gesture to text translator, a text to gesture trans...
The work described in this paper addresses the development of a game focused on a teaching strategy based on an action-research study. The strategy established aims to test the impact of the student’s participation in a collaborative project. The project aimed to motivate students to use and learn foreign languages and also to develop their intercu...
Promoted by the significant increase of large scale internet access, many audiences turned to the web and it's resources, for learning and inspiration, with a diverse set of skills and intents. MOOC corresponds to Open and Mass Online Course and is a learning model, supported on a web tool based learning process, that allows anyone with a minimum o...
Questions
Questions (4)
We are developing a project, ACE - Assisted Communication for Education, that proposes an architecture to support real time translation between sign and oral languages in both ways. This translation can then be used by the blind, so they can perceive the sign language as speech. Similarly, blind people can communicate with the deaf by using speech or written text which is converted to sign language. This bidirectional translation is available to assist the communication between the deaf and non-deaf communities using the VirtualSign tools.
What are the most important requirements that we should consider when developing a serious game for the blind community?
What are the most important requirements that we should consider when developing a serious game for the deaf community?
Do you know where to publish an article in the field of assistive technology? I'm looking for a journal with high impact factor and open access policy.
