Parkinson’s Disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder and physical exercise is essential in its treatment process. The use of new technologies to persuade, motivate and activate individuals for health behaviour change has been a quickly expanding field of research. This paper focuses on studying how pervasive serious games can be designed using low-cost off-the-shelf controllers and interaction devices usually used with commercial consoles for gaming. The research work has the ultimate goal of establishing how serious games based on Virtual Reality should be designed according to the impact of the technology on people with Parkinson’s Disease.

We live surrounded by computing devices, but we are not yet combining them into a natural unified user experience. Therefore, we have designed and implemented a framework to generalize and support the development of multi-device applications, which distribute their User Interfaces (UI) across co-located devices. The framework is composed of: authentication and authorization services; a broker to sync information across application instances; background services to gather the capabilities of the devices; an integration module with an indoor positioning system to determine when to associate devices. It provides a library to determine the components to be displayed based on UI requirements and the capabilities of the available devices. It also includes elements to manage the distribution of UI components and application states that can be shared to enable collaboration. We present an application prototype and a user study which assesses how multi-device applications are perceived by users. The results are very positive, indicating that we should keep working on our research since the users received very well the prototype and the concept, which also validates the support provided by the framework.

We live surrounded by the most varied computing devices, which may give us the opportunity to combine them to form a unified and richer user experience. Considering this opportunity, we created the UnaxY Framework to support the development of applications with UI components distributed by co-located devices. This paper is focused on a feasibility study based on two prototype applications created using UnaxY. We performed user studies to evaluate concepts associated to this type of applications and the framework they were based on. We had a special interest in assessing how managing the application state and collaborating across devices would be perceived and received by users. The results are positive and clearly indicate that we should continue developing solutions that support a generalized implementation of applications with the user interaction spanning multiple devices.

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 devices. We designed the YanuX framework, which generalizes and supports the development of this new type of applications. A key issue is the automatic distribution of user interface (UI) components among co-located devices. We created the tools set needed to describe the capabilities of each of the devices present in the environment and the requirements of each of the applications' components as configured by the developers. Restrictions of the components should match the capabilities of the devices leading to a UI component distribution decision that should reflect developers' intentions and expectations of the users. Besides detailing YanuX's components, the paper also presents YouTube Viewer as a proof-of-concept application based on YanuX. The application was also used in a user study to evaluate the concept and the experience supported by the framework. The results presented here are positive and very promising.

Although public displays installations are easy to attract the attention of passers-by to specific content, they present an issue in targeting the right audience. We envision public displays installations working as platforms in which different interactive applications run with highly personalised content based on personal characteristics and interests of a person attending the public displays. Mobile devices can act as an important interaction tool that complements the public screen, providing a feeling of privacy, but they can also be used to get users' preferences in order to obtain their user profiles. This paper is focused on demonstrating how personalisation can be designed and applied to improve the user experience in public display systems, integrating mobile interaction to potentiate the approach. It describes a public display experiment deployed at a university campus and presents a user study composed of two phases: the system without personalisation and the system with personalisation.

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 want to explore the possibility of building applications that have their user interface seamlessly distributed across co-located devices. We created the YanuX Framework to provide the guidelines and tools needed by developers to build those applications. This paper presents the framework and its architecture, which is outlined along with the description of its components. We end by presenting an early evaluation of YanuX and by discussing the status of our work along with directions for further research.

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 tool