Abstract
In this work it is presented a system to help the users to maintain an active lifestyle. Our main objective is to evaluate the current mobile technologies for the development of systems to monitor the users' health and to promote a healthy lifestyle. It was developed a full system, including: an application for smartwatch; an application for smartphone; a back-end with a webservice in PHP. The application provides the functionalities to acquire the user's: heart rate; location, based on the GPS position; the number of steps; the position's elevation; etc. The back-end is used to register the data acquired and processed by the applications. The design was user centric and the development methodology was based on the agile paradigm, for which are described three development iterations.

Abstract

Abstract
Social isolation and loneliness are among the important factors for the degradation of the life quality as the persons’ aging process advances. These factors can have a pronounced effect on the general health and are caused by the decrease in social interaction by the person with the friends, family and ex-coworkers groups. On the other hand, the software and hardware technologies has reached a maturation point were the electronic assistants can acquire information from the user through camera images, as well as to communicate with the user by means of natural voice language. In this context, a model for the adoption of electronic intelligent assistants by the elderlies has been proposed in previous work. In the current work, it is assessed the possibility of using the current consumer assistants to implement the proposed model. Several assistants are analyzed (Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple), assessing their functionalities and how they could be used to assist the elderly in strengthening their social bonds with the family, friends and ex-co-workers groups. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract

Abstract
The collection of health and fitness longitudinal data can be used to model disease progression and shape new algorithms to diagnose and predict health hazards. Continuously tracking vital signs, in particular heart rate and skin temperature, can be very informative by using models and algorithms to predict and notify the user about when he might be falling ill. With the current wearable devices and the proper algorithms, the individual can be permanently monitored, which might be much more interesting than a one-off reading comparison with the population average, made by a doctor. It would be possible to intervene earlier and to prevent somebody from becoming seriously ill. From a broader perspective, the knowledge about a user’s health can be considered as an element of that user’s context and be used by context aware applications to provide higher value to the user. After the trivialization of the data acquisition sensors, wearable devices, and raw data, the next logical step is the development of contained software components that can infer and produce knowledge from the raw data. These components and the knowledge they produce can be used by all sorts of applications in order to further customize their usage by a specific user. Customization and context awareness, in regard to health, is a wide field for research and there are a multitude of proposals for models and algorithms. In this review work we searched for software components (frameworks, software libraries, etc.), freely available and that can be used as building blocks for other computer systems by software developers. Copyright

Abstract
The visually impaired must face several well-known difficulties on their daily life. The use of technology in assistive systems can greatly improve their lives by helping with navigation and orientation, for which several approaches and technologies have been proposed. Lately, it has been introduced powerful online image processing services, based on machine learning and deep learning, promising truly cognitive assessment capacities. Google and Microsoft are two of these main players. In this work we built a device to be used by the blind in order to test the usage of the Google and Microsoft services to assist the blind. The online services were tested by researchers in a laboratory environment and by blind users on a large meeting room, familiar to them. This work reports on our findings regarding the online services effectiveness, the user interface and system latency. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018.