Rui Neves Madeira

Instituto Politécnico de Setúbal · Department of Systems and Information Technology

Small and medium-sized farms struggle with increased needs for monitoring in different dimensions, even by having to respond to regulatory requirements, e.g., by the global push to reduce pesticides and to improve soil health. Moreover, with the rising needs for food production there has been an effort to shift agriculture into a new era, in which...

People interact with their surroundings using several multimodal methods. Human-computer interaction is performed using these capabilities in order to provide, as much as possible, the most natural and productive experiences through speech, touch, vision, and gesture. The Web-based application used in this paper is a multi-platform video annotation...

One of the reasons why patients lose focus and interest in physiotherapy exercises is their repetitive nature. Frequently used techniques when trying to promote user engagement and motivation are the gamification of tasks and use of serious games. This paper conceptualizes a framework model to support the design of serious games for children with s...

One of the reasons why patients lose focus and interest in physiotherapy exercises is their repetitive nature. Frequently used techniques when trying to promote user engagement and motivation are the gamification of tasks and use of serious games. This paper conceptualizes a framework model to support the design of serious games for children with s...

This paper presents an ongoing research work that aims to develop governance models and ICTs to enable and empower persons with disabilities according to the orientations settled in the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Starting from the study of the current model of Independent Living Support adopted in Portugal and its practi...

Services to Empower YOU” (SEU) responde a um desafio societal que visa fornecer a pessoas com deficiência ou incapacidade uma ferramenta agregadora e inclusiva através da qual possam requisitar com confiança serviços. Este artigo apresenta os resultados iniciais obtidos no projeto SEU que compreende o estudo da conceção e implementação de interface...

We developed an Indoor Positioning System (IPS) as part of the effort of creating Ubicomp applications with user interfaces distributed across different co-located devices. It relies on a Client that runs on the devices that we intend to locate and a Server that determines their positions. It currently supports three positioning methods: fingerprin...

Aging in place happens when people age in the residence of their choice, usually their homes because it is their preference for living as long as possible. This paper introduces the implementation of a computational platform to support active aging in place with a particular focus on the caregivers and their requirements to accomplish their tasks w...

We currently live surrounded by many different computing devices. Therefore, it is important to take better advantage of those devices by coming up with smart ways of integrating and combining them. We have been exploring the possibility of building applications that present user interfaces pervasively distributed across different co-located device...

ONParkinson is an integrated platform that aims to provide smart assistance towards the empowerment of the triad comprised of people with Parkinson's disease, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. Initial studies have shown the importance of providing patients and their caregivers with accessible and credible information to allow them to d...

This paper presents a multi-platform Web-based video annotator to support multimodal annotation that can be applied to several working areas, such as dance rehearsals, among others. The CultureMoves’ “Motion-Notes” Annotator was designed to assist the creative and exploratory processes of both professional and amateur users, working with a digital...

Industry 4.0 (I4.0) has brought many changes in the way workers operate on and interact with smarter industrial machinery and spaces. New Human-Machine Interaction (HMI) solutions are required as the workers’ demands in the factory are still evolving. This paper introduces the development of a generic model-driven HMI solution that consists of a fr...

ONParkinson is an integrated platform that aims to provide smart assistance towards the empowerment of the triad comprised of people with Parkinson’s disease, their caregivers and healthcare professionals. Initial studies have shown the importance of providing patients and their caregivers with accessible and credible information to allow them to d...

We live surrounded by computing devices, but applications are mostly confined to run on a single device. It should be possible to make better use of the multiple devices around us by coming up with ways of integrating and combining them, while leveraging the specific strengths of some devices and minimizing the individual weaknesses of others. We w...

Poster presented at MUM 2018 as the counterpart to the accepted poster paper (DOI: 10.1145/3282894.3289727).

The ONParkinson mHealth platform aims to empower an integrated assistance to support end-users of the triad “people with Parkinson’s Disease, their carers and health professionals”, promoting the self-management in Parkinson’s disease. Therefore, ONParkinson is expected to optimize the communication between the triad users, helping them find releva...

This paper presents the “just Physio kidding” approach, which intends to improve the engaging qualities of therapy programmes towards children with special needs, mainly with cerebral palsy, spinal muscular atrophy, or developmental delay. Therefore, “just Physio kidding” intends to address both physiotherapy and cognitive stimulation therapy. The...

This paper presents the concept and the user evaluation study of the first Super-Fon’s prototype, which is a mobile health app with a serious game approach for Android Tablets. It was developed with the main goal of working as a complement to the therapeutic intervention in phonological disorders in children between 3 and 8 years old. The app compr...

Seriouslgames based therapeutic approaches create environments that increase the motivation of patients to achieve successful completion of therapy programs that can be demanding. The therapeutic games should be designed and configured by therapists, who should also monitor and evaluate, on a regular basis, the therapy exercises masked by the games...

There is an emerging consumer-driven demand for a more personalised health system and, there is no question, the rapid evolution of the mobile apps market became an important driver for personalisation in the health field. The MAiThE (Mobile Apps to improve ThErapy) project focuses on the deployment and study of personalised mHealth apps to provide...

Virtual Reality based rehabilitation is much based on sensing devices that capture and quantitatively assess the patients' movements to track their progress more accurately. There are a few commercially available and affordable sensors. Among them, Kinect is an important asset to the concept of Natural User Interfaces, which is gaining a wider spac...

Abstract: The ONParkinson mHealth platform aims to empower an integrated assistance to support end-users of the triad “people with Parkinson’s Disease, their carers and health professionals”, promoting the self-management in Parkinson’s disease. Therefore, ONParkinson is expected to optimize the communication between the triad users, helping them f...

There is a need to deliver personalized experiences in terms of synchronization between television broadcasts and second screen applications to avoid frustrating experiences. However, within a second screen gaming scenario based on TV broadcasts, if players synchronize with a delay higher than the real delay of the TV broadcast, they will have an u...

In this paper, we present the design of a mobile application to empower an integrated assistance to support users of the triad: "people with Parkinson's disease, their caregivers and healthcare professionals". Starting from a deep study of this triad's needs, a mobile application was designed to support not just the communication between the triad...

The mobile application BroiStu was developed due to the need of having a better insight on the impact of stuttering on people who stutter's everyday life. This paper presents a study on this application, verifying which features of impact of stuttering found in scientific literature are included in the application and making a comparison with a sim...

Recent advances in technology created new opportunities to enhance TV personalization, providing viewers with individualized ways to watch TV and to interact with its content. Second screen applications are promising vehicles to enhance the viewers’ experiences, but researchers need to take into account the effect that the TV delay has on viewers,...

A common issue on live sports TV broadcasts happens when a viewer hears a neighbour screaming a goal before watching it on his TV. Similarly, viewers will also have a disruptive experience if a second screen application, designed to present information synchronised with the live TV broadcast, displays information beforehand. This paper presents a s...

Ubiquitous computing is strongly centered on the human, aiming to provide the right information through personalized interfaces and services in context of use to the applications users. We envision a ubiquitous computing based world in which a generic personalization model is applied to different applications, even if from different domains. The mo...

We propose a platform with the goal of helping developers when they need to apply personalization to ubiquitous computing applications, ranging from simple mobile apps to rich multimodal systems. The platform's core is a general personalization model, which provides the orientation and required tools to simplify and accelerate the creation of perso...

Serious games based therapy is currently gaining a lot of interest by the healthcare community. Moreover, the use of Virtual Reality technology in rehabilitation has attracted significant interest in the physical therapy area. This paper presents PhysioMate, which is a project with the aim of developing software based on the concept of serious game...

Therapies based on serious games are gaining a lot of interest by the healthcare community. The efficiency of this approach is demonstrated by several studies and many projects. This paper presents the project Super-Fon, which is focused on a serious game developed as a mobile application to support speech therapeutic intervention in the phonologic...

An accumulation of scientific evidence has emerged during the 1980s and 1990s, that is, physical activity would have significant benefits on health and well-being. Consequently, increasing participation of people in physical activities over the last decades has also led to a growing number of sports injuries and, simultaneously, higher demands on f...

This paper presents the project iReport SportsInjuries, which is a system with a focus on a Web application directed to sport health professionals, supporting the acquisition, analysis and dissemination of sports injuries information. This software will allow health professionals register and analyze sports injuries among sports populations. The ap...

The mobile application Super-Fon is a serious game developed to support speech therapeutic intervention with children between three and eight years old, in the phonological development area. The game comprises a range of activities, divided by levels which represent different phases of a therapeutic intervention based on the Metaphon methodology. T...

The last years created a solid opportunity to realize an important vision of ubiquitous computing, which is the seamless and pervasive integration of mobile and fixed infrastructures to support everyday tasks. Nowadays, mobile devices are essential tools for developed countries' daily living, while situated large displays are being widely deployed...

This paper describes the project I Aware my Stuttering, which is a system with a focus on a mobile application for smartphones directed to people who stutter. This software will allow users to register their stuttering related situations, registering, for example, the contexts in which they occur, the interlocutors and their reactions to the situat...

One of the recurrent major environmental problems is the high energy consumption. It has been challenging to find methods of persuading people to have better habits on energy usage. We are proposing the use of personalization to enhance a mobile and pervasive-based gaming approach to better foster domestic energy awareness close to people. The game...

Blended learning refers to a mixing of different learning environments. It combines traditional classroom learning with modern computer-mediated activities. The present work presents the implementation of a Web-based system to help the application of blended learning to enhance learning in math courses of engineering degrees. The system is being in...

Pervasive Computing is not yet fully realized, presenting critical challenges such as obtaining and choosing the relevant content and interfaces for user interaction, which is a hard task in many applications from diverse domains. This research work focuses on a proposal to facilitate the implementation of the desired smart interfaces that pervasiv...

Games elements are transcending the usual boundaries of their medium to enhance user experience and user engagement in non-game applications. Therapeutic serious gaming allows a patient to execute specific exercises while engaging with a game, trying to achieve its goals related to therapeutic activities. A ubiquitous therapeutic game corresponds t...

Nowadays, energy consumption (and wastage) is particularly a major issue in our society. It has been a challenge to find ways of educating people to follow better attitudes towards energy savings. This paper proposes a pervasive-based serious game approach to help people understand household energy usage and to persuade them to change negative ener...

Serious games-based therapies are currently gaining massive interest of both computer science and healthcare communities. This paper focuses on the design and use of personalized therapeutic serious games in a pervasive healthcare assistive environment that integrates smart objects such as wheelchairs. The smart objects have embedded sensors to mea...

Mobile learning has been receiving increased attention from diverse conferences and publications. The attention is well deserved because, if correctly implemented, it constitutes an efficient complementary tool to the traditional learning methods. Following this idea, we present PortableLab, a mobile learning system that integrates an application d...

Health assessment requirements for aging population have accentuated the need of ubiquitous and pervasive e-Health environments. Recently, new implemented embedded vital signs sensors were joined to ubiquitous computation in order to materialize Ubi-Health systems with lower price and augmented interoperability in comparison with traditional clinic...

Optimal cardiovascular, respiratory and motor activity assessment of wheelchair users using modern technologies of pervasive sensing and computing represents the main objective of the running project. In order to extract accurate information about physiological parameters provided by physical measurement channel and also to estimate additional para...

In the last years several mobile learning courses have been experimented. The increasing popularity and additional features of mobile devices is one of the key reasons for that development. Some of the courses are adaptations and others are fully developed for mobile devices. The superior portability and accessibility of those equipments makes them...

In recent years, the research in the area of Ubiquitous Computing has intensified, with many technological advances occurring, but the current scenario is still far away from an everyday life fulfilled with seamless ubiquitous systems. Within this context, a proposal of an infrastructure is studied and presented. It is based on a set of guiding pri...

In the last years several mobile learning courses have been experimented. The increasing popularity and additional features of mobile devices is one of the key reasons for mobile learning courses development. The superior portability and accessibility of those equipments makes them suitable for remote and interactive learning courses. In this conte...

In recent years, the research in the area of ubiquitous healthcare has intensified. There are many technological advances regarding the development of unobtrusive sensors for cardiac and respiratory activity, but the current scenario is still far away from an everyday life fulfilled with ubiquitous healthcare systems. In this paper, it is described...

We are facing promising developments in the area of mobile services where context-aware systems can take the location and position of a user, her preferences and `smart' objects into account, adding (implicit) interaction between a mobile device (of the user) and the real world. The assimilation of ubiquitous computing by education marks an importa...

Competition is evident throughout our society, lives and work. “It transcends time and place, as well as all manners of people”. In this paper, we present a study and a framework proposal for a mixed collaborative-competitive learning environment, applied to a programming course in a University level engineering program. While neither collaboration...

With the growing popularity of mobile devices, several projects for mobile learning courses have been developed. Those equipments allow a superior portability and accessibility of the learning courses. In this context, the present paper focuses on the development of a mobile learning framework for an analog electronics course. This course was desig...

Ubiquitous Computing has the main goal of building computer systems that support and facilitate the daily lives of users, without being intrusive. This paper follows a perspective that advocates a cautious and iterative approach to the vision of Ubiquitous Computing. In this context, it is presented a system with a particular application goal, base...

The energy sector plays a vital role in achieving social and economic development through satisfying the energy needs of the different economic sectors. However, vast majority of power stations burn fossil fuels in order to produce energy. In this way, saving energy and using it efficiently is important. So, in this paper, it will be described a mo...

Ubiquitous Computing has the main goal of building computing systems that support and facilitate the daily lives of users, but being the least intrusive possible. There are many technological advances reported in literature, but the current scenario is still far away from an everyday life fulfilled with ubiquitous systems. The main objective of thi...

Energy efficiency offers a powerful and cost-effective tool for the achievement of a sustainable energy future. It is therefore never too early to start teaching children about the importance of saving energy. So, in this paper it will be presented a web-based support for Rational Use of Electric Energy Awareness. This tool was specially developed...

We are currently seeing a lot of research in the areas of ubiquitous computing involving mobile devices and public shared displays. In this paper, we describe an infrastructure to augment physical objects and an example using this framework to make information available to users, in a specific space, in an automatic and personalized way. The paper...