Ensemble learning-based Interactive Machine Learning (IML) offers significant potential for enhancing user-adaptive healthcare monitoring in resource-constrained environments, where preserving privacy and minimizing interaction burden are crucial. This work presents a novel cascade strategy that uses discriminative models to integrate personalization into interactive learning pipelines. It enables lightweight, adaptive activity recognition systems suited for deployment in edge and home-based healthcare scenarios (i.e., local devices and in-home systems). To achieve this, the proposed cascade dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to match user engagement, triggering selective interaction only when prediction certainty is low. User-labeled data is then used to incrementally retrain the models, enabling personalized adaptation over time. We evaluate the approach on a hydration-related activity dataset as an example of routines relevant to smart health monitoring. Results show that even limited user participation yields measurable improvements, with personalized models achieving higher accuracy than generic ones using only a few additional annotations. This demonstrates the feasibility of combining low-effort interaction with edge-compatible Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance real-time, personalized decision-making. Thus, the method supports the development of efficient, adaptive, and human-aware health solutions.

The adoption of IoT technology to improve wellness and health awareness in workplace environments is increasingly vital. However, the acceptance of such e-health interventions largely depends on employees' perceptions of their value versus the privacy and security risks associated with data usage. Hence, addressing these concerns is paramount for fostering trust and ensuring the successful integration of technology. For this reason, this work explores the critical role of privacy in the workplace and examines how concepts of data control and ownership can improve the acceptance and effectiveness of IoT solutions. Leveraging insights from an online questionnaire with 524 participants from European countries, the obtained findings contribute to the existing literature by expanding the understanding of data control in workplace contexts and providing valuable insights for designing IoT-mediated e-health interventions that effectively address employees' privacy concerns.

As the number of interconnected devices increases and more artificial intelligence (AI) applications upon the Internet of Things (IoT) start to flourish, so does the environmental cost of the computational resources needed to send and process all the generated data. Therefore, promoting the optimization of AI applications is a key factor for the sustainable development of IoT solutions. Paradigms such as Edge Computing are progressively proposed as a solution in the IoT field, becoming an alternative to delegate all the computation to the Cloud. However, bringing the computation to the local stage is limited by the resources’ availability of the devices hosted at the Edge of the network. For this reason, this work presents an approach that simplifies the complexity of supervised learning algorithms at the Edge. Specifically, it separates complex models into multiple simpler classifiers forming a cascade of discriminative models. The suitability of this proposal in a human activity recognition (HAR) context is assessed by comparing the performance of three different variations of this strategy. Furthermore, its computational cost is analyzed in several resource-constrained Edge devices in terms of processing time. The experimental results show the viability of this approach to outperform other ensemble methods, i.e., the Stacking technique. Moreover, it substantially reduces the computational cost of the classification tasks by more than 60% without a significant accuracy loss (around 3.5%). This highlights the potential of this strategy to reduce resource and energy requirements in IoT architectures and promote more efficient and sustainable classification solutions.

During experiments with electric circuits, students often make mistakes. To handle these situations, remote laboratories such as VISIR (Virtual Instruments Systems in Reality) rely on error-handling mechanisms, which do not always cover all errors. This article seeks to extend a previously published work when trying to assimilate all possible errors in alternated current circuits with a single power supply and a single passive component. The goal is to build an errors’ map with all possible errors, covering all circuits that can be assembled in VISIR, from the simplest to the most complex. This allows limiting misconceptions during theoretical and practical understanding are limited.

This paper introduces the Spanish Chapter of the IEEE Education Society, the CESEI, and its main activities. Along the years since its appearance, the CESEI has developed several initiatives devoted to promote the development of engineering education using new information and communication technologies. Publications and participation in relevant conferences have attracted the main efforts, but also the awards provided to the best student academic works is a remarkable action. It deserves special attention the activities performed in cooperation with the student branches, because they have been very fruitful. The paper describes all these initiatives and discusses about future actions.

Social demands have promoted an educational approach based on an “anywhere and anytime” premise. Remote laboratories have emerged as the answer to the demands of technical educational areas for adapting themselves to this scenario. The result has not only benefit distance learning students but has provided new learning scenarios both for teachers and students as well as allowing a flexible approach to experimental topics. However, as any other solution for providing practical scenarios (hands-on labs, virtual labs or simulators), remote labs face several constraints inherited from the subsystems of its deployment -hardware (real instruments, equipment and scenario) and software (analog/digital conversions, communications, workbenches, etc.)-. This paper describes the Erasmus+ project Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR (PILAR) which deals with several units of the federation installed in different educational institutions and devoted to analog electronics and electrical circuits. Based on the limitations of remote labs, the need for the federation will be justified and its benefits will be described.

The PILAR (Platform Integration of Laboratories based on the Architecture of visiR) Erasmus Plus project started in September 2016 and will last three years. The core of the PILAR project is the VISIR remote laboratory -Virtual Instruments System In Reality-. The project aims for a federation of five of the existing VISIR nodes, sharing experiments, capacity and resources among partners, and to provide access to VISIR remote lab, through PILAR consortium, to students from other educational institutions. PILAR will be the framework from which management tasks will be performed and laboratories/experiments will be shared. PILAR will also foster the Special Interest Group of VISIR under the Global Online Laboratory Consortium (GOLC) of the International Association of Online Engineering (IAOE).

A remote laboratory is a hardware and software solution that enables students to interact with real equipment located somewhere else on the internet. This way, students interact with a real laboratory as if they were on a hands-on-lab session. Once the equipment is remote, it is also possible to share it among institutions, so students from one school or university can access a lab in another university. While there is an interest by many universities of sharing their laboratories, and there are several experiences doing so, the impact has been typically limited. One of the reasons for the limited impact is the lack of robustness in most solutions due to technical issues, which leads to a lack of trust and interest by the potential consumers. LabsLand is a spin-off of the WebLab-Deusto research group which sells access to laboratories of universities to other schools and universities. This contribution analyzes through use cases what are the technical and organizational pitfalls that were found in the process of taking real laboratories and making them available commercially and what are the solutions used to tackle the issues arisen.

Interactive live streaming is a key feature of applications and platforms in which the actions of the viewers affect the content of the stream. In those, a minimal capture-display delay is critical. Though recent technological advances have certainly made it possible to provide web-based interactive live-streaming, little research is available that compares the real-world performance of the different web-based schemes. In this paper we use educational remote laboratories as a case study. We analyze the restrictions that web-based interactive live-streaming applications have, such as a low delay. We also consider additional characteristics that are often sought in production systems, such as universality and deployability behind institutional firewalls. The paper describes and experimentally compares the most relevant approaches for the study. With the provided descriptions and real-world experimental results, researchers, designers and developers can: a) select among the interactive live-streaming approaches which are available for their real-world systems, b) decide which one is most appropriate for their purpose, and c) know what performance and results they can expect.

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to access real equipment located somewhere else through the Internet. The laboratories are typically deployed in universities or research centers. A key factor of remote laboratories is that once they are available through the Internet their usage can be scaled up and used by students of other institutions. Thus, two or more institutions can share different equipment to reduce costs. Furthermore, this enables a sharing economy where multiple providers provide access to their laboratories to each other, freely or not. However, while the number of remote laboratory initiatives is high, the overall impact of these laboratories is fairly limited beyond the scope of the host institution or the scope (and duration) of projects in which the host institution is involved. The focus of this contribution is to outline a novel initiative addressing this scaling problem. After over 10 years working on the area our research group has started a spin-off focused on this topic, called LabsLand. A key factor of this spin-off is to provide a platform similar to other sharing economy marketplaces, aiming to provide features commonly ignored in the remote laboratories literature such as trust, accurate reliability or different pricing schemes for different scenarios.

This paper describes the planning and design remote laboratory for school curriculum with support of secondary school teachers as a focus group. The pros and cons of different types of laboratories applying in practical context are discussed. The mock-up designed in a paper prototyping format is presented. The results of the performed activity was applied for final development of remote experiment - Archimedes Principles.

Developing educational apps that cover a wide range of learning contexts and languages is a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce the AppComposer Web app to address this issue. The AppComposer aims at empowering teachers to easily translate and adapt existing apps that fit their educational contexts. Developers do not need to provide extensive translations and configurations of their apps and can simply follow certain guidelines to make their apps translatable and adaptable by the AppComposer. Since the AppComposer makes use of the standard internationalization specification used by OpenSocial, even external apps can be translated without contacting the original developer.

InnoEscuela is more than a learning experience, a programmed methodology to implement courses related to Technology and Computing which follows an innovative way of teaching. The methodology focuses on Project-based learning and team work. Students organize themselves in teams which are called innovative enterprises and they have to decide to create a solution to a social disadvantage, technical problem, or any other kind of need they perceive. That's why the core of the courses is focused to practice the whole Technological Innovation process.

The lack of tracking and storing capabilities for the results of web-based learning activities is an issue that remains unsolved. Transitions or interactions defined by teachers through a set of conditions still require programming skills that stay far beyond the desired final results. In addition to this, authoring tools should be powerful enough to let lecturers generate contents which are high-quality, interactive, and tuned to each student's cognitive preferences and progress. Availability and processing capabilities, or motivation, relevance, etc., must also be aspects to address in this context. For these reasons, this paper aims to review the existing web application authoring toolkits focusing on distance education. In particular, we analize their main features, requirements and issues, as well as the most promising areas for future improvemenst in this field.

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool which enables students to use real equipment -located in an educational institution- through the Internet. This way, students can experiment as if they were using the laboratories with their own hands. And, depending on the design, instructors can later see the results of these students. During the last decade, federation protocols to share remote laboratories have emerged. The focus of these protocols is to be make remote laboratories of one institution available in other in an automated manner, through institutional contracts. And these federation protocols usually rely on existing Remote Laboratory Management Systems (RLMS), which usually provide APIs for tracking student usage. At the same time, the interest on Learning Analytics is increasing. Learning Analytics focuses on the measurement and analysis of data about learners in their context. In the particular context of federated remote laboratories, new challenges arise: on the one hand, remote laboratories must be prepared to track insightful information from the student session so as to extract patterns, and on the other hand, the usage of a federated environment requires different degrees of anonymity. This contribution describes the new Learning Analytics dashboard of WebLab-Deusto, detailing what information can be extracted and how the usage of a RLMS simplifies the development of such tools in a federated environment.

Educational remote laboratories are software and hardware tools that allow students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of these remote laboratories have existed for years, focused on allowing two universities to share their equipment. Additionally, the integration of remote laboratories in Learning Tools-LT-(Learning Management Systems, Content Management Systems or Personal Learning Environments) has been achieved in the past in order to integrate remote laboratories as part of the learning curricula, being part of the practice exercises or even as a tool of evaluation. An cross-institutional initiative called gateway4labs has been created to perform this integration through federation protocols. In this contribution, this initiative adds support for OpenSocial as a new protocol for Learning Tools (in particular, for EPFL Graasp), as well as for the iLab Shared Architecture (in addition to WebLab-Deusto and UNR FCEIA laboratories already supported). Supporting OpenSocial opens a number of new technical and organizational challenges since public labs should be supported without registering students, teachers or schools. The focus of this contribution is to show these challenges and how they are tackled in the proposed open source implementation.

In this paper we present an automatic assessment model for competences developed in a physics course using VISIR remote experiment, based on a rubric and using learning analytics techniques to process data automatically collected from students' activity using Weblab-Deusto platform.

Nowadays, a large number of online laboratories are available and deployed throughout the world. Most of them are sponsored by universities and often only used by their home institution, because they tend to be dedicated to the needs of their creators. However, in many cases these labs provide successful experiences and other teachers would wish to incorporate them into their classroom activities and to embrace Learning-by-Experience methodologies. Currently, they cannot do that effectively without first tailoring the lab experience to their own teaching style and the educational background of their students. This can be a complicated affair, due the closed nature of many online labs and the steep learning curve of the few tools that allow customization. This paper describes the work on an application builder, named App Composer, which aims to make it easy for school teachers to create their own customized applications from existing ones. Different customization levels are provided, each one powered by a different type of composer. For instance, teachers will be able to easily translate an application into a new language, or to start with a template and create a customized version of an application. The App Composer makes use of Graasp and Open Social - a widely-used, interoperable and open technology.

A remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool which enables students to use real equipment -located in an educational institution- through the Internet. This way, students can experiment as if they were using the laboratories with their own hands. There are usually two approaches when designing remote laboratories: relying on small, inexpensive devices that can be deployed anywhere or relying software rich software infrastructures that support high load of users, providing panel administration, access to other institutional servers (e.g. directories such as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol “LDAP”), etc. With distributed remote laboratory architectures, it is possible to have the laboratory server on the former approach, but the management usually relies on the latter. In certain entities, such as secondary schools or farm schools, they may not be willing to buy and maintain a dedicated server for remote laboratories, and therefore the former approach is more adequate. However, a tradeoff is being made between management capabilities and how easy is to deploy the system. This contribution shows how federation could help in solving this tradeoff, and it uses a real fish tank remote laboratory as a case study.

A vast number of learning content and tools can be found over Internet. Currently, most of them are ad-hoc solutions which are developed for a particular learning platform or environment. New concepts, such as Widgets, Smart devices, Internet of Thing and learning Clouds, are ideas whose goals is the creation of shareable online learning scenarios over different devices and environments.

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities or educational centers. Federations of remote laboratories have existed for years: students of one university transparently access laboratories of other university through software systems that enable these contracts. However, traditionally these contracts have been defined in a “one to one” basis and both universities using the same remote laboratory management system. The focus of this contribution is to present different interoperable bridges among different remote laboratory systems and explore how they can be chained to build complex ecosystems of remote laboratories. The impact of this chaining is that, if successful, it would definitely contribute to the adoption of remote laboratories.

The main goal of the OLAREX project is to offer to providers of formal and non-formal education an efficient way to improve their e-didactic and digital competences. For this purpose a training program is created with using ICT-based learning materials, remote laboratories, and e-learning methodologies. The project's primary target groups are the European secondary schools. More specifically: secondary school and university teachers, students and managers of schools, museum employees and their visitors, and other STEM education providers.

This paper describes the current influence of the remote laboratory on practical learning aspects of secondary sector of education. The key challenges faced by the teaching of science include insufficient hands-on laboratory usage in classrooms. The main objective of the paper is to present learning approach of adaptation and usage of remote experiments of WebLab-Deusto in curriculum of secondary school. The activity was organized in collaboration with secondary school teachers of P. Andrés Urdaneta School. Educators can benefit from different teaching methods (collaborative, inquiry-, and project-based learning) integrated in WebLab-Deusto. The teaching of Ohm's Law in Physics curriculum of secondary school was one of the topics executed during this research. The remote laboratory assignment for students was developed on Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR) Open Lab Platform. The existing remote laboratories are more or less copies of hands-on ones. VISIR is a remote laboratory created by Blekinge Institute of technology (BTH) for designing, wiring and measurement of electric circuits. This main feature of VISIR allows one building a scenario of performing basic DC and low frequency AC circuits experiments related to Ohm's and Kirchhoff's laws. Moreover, the students will become familiar with instruments, components, manuals, data sheets, circuit wiring, and other laboratory work. In the paper the main principle of VISIR will be presented; the remote experiments executed by students will be shown. Finally, the result of integrating of remote experiments for study in Urdaneta School will be discussed.

Educational remote laboratories are a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in universities as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Their integration in Content and Learning Management Systems (CMSs or LMSs) has been an active research topic for years, supporting mainly ad hoc solutions. A notable exception has been the use of federation protocols -commonly used for sharing laboratories from one university to other-, for actually sharing laboratories from a remote laboratory system to a C/LMS. This approach opened new doors in the simplification of the process, since it did not require the remote laboratories to make any type of change. The focus of this contribution is to provide a solution to decrease the number of functionalities required for creating an integration by providing a software component that reuses them. As shown in the contribution, this component has been implemented and two remote laboratory management systems (which provide access to multiple remote laboratories) are already supported, and a third one is under development. In the C/LMS side, all the LMSs supporting IMS LTI are supported, and HTTP APIs are provided for being supported by other systems. Indeed, the contribution describes its support in the Joomla CMS and in the Moodle 1.9 and dotLRN LMSs which do not support IMS LTI. The solution, called gateway4labs, is an open source initiative which targets to be used in production.

This paper describes the integration of a remote lab in a tool for educational digital circuits. Boole-Deusto is an educational software tool featuring truth tables, Karnaugh maps, Boolean expressions, finite-state machines and digital circuits. After creating the design through Boole-Deusto, the user can implement the circuit in a remote lab (WebLab-Deusto) with only a few mouse clicks. The user does not need the technical knowledge, time, hardware equipment and specialized software that would normally be required. These conveniences benefit teachers and students alike, especially those involved in basic courses in digital electronics, both at the university and high school levels.

Although science, engineering, and technology have an influence on humanity's present and future challenges, many students lack even a fundamental knowledge in these disciplines. Science teachers are looking for new teaching models and tools that provide skills for entering careers these fields. During the last two decades academia has recognized education games as a beneficial instrument for this purpose. This paper presents first steps in the design and development of the online education game, based on the remote experiments - a microcontroller managed mobile bot (ROBOT). A scenario, architecture, and design of the game will be described. The technological restrictions of the remote experiments will be discussed.

This paper presents the work that has been developed in parallel to the VISIR project. The objective of this new control model is to obtain a set of algorithms and systems that will be able to be deployed in remote labs focus on analog electronic regardless of the experiments and instruments included in the lab but with the performance provided by the VISIR platform.

LabVIEW is a development environment from National Instruments, focused on the automation of processing and measuring equipment, and it is and has been for years a crucial tool in Educational Remote Laboratories. Three features are key for this success: a) a visual programming language called G, so developers don't need to work with traditional “text” programming languages, therefore achieving a wider range of experiment developers; b) a strong industrial support and c) the “Remote Panels”, where the developer publishes the application automatically in a web browser. However, Remote Panels require a plug-in to run, not available for mobile devices neither all browsers in operating systems, and it clearly breaks with the ongoing web development trends, more interested in HTML5. This contribution shows how LabVIEW Remote Panels are used in Remote Laboratories, describing its inclusion in the WebLab-Deusto platform, and it describes the advantages and disadvantages of its use, comparing it with other existing approaches.

A new model for building and measuring analog electronic circuits has been developed and validated in the area of remote laboratories. The goal of the proposed solution is to facilitate and improve the set-up, maintenance and update of the hardware used during the configuration, control and measurement of the instruments and experiments included in the lab. The experimental setup does not reduce the performance of the lab, allowing the users to carry out the same actions and activities as they were in a hands-on laboratory. Therefore, thanks to this new paradigm users can practice through Internet and transparently to the hardware that makes possible the remote configuration of the experiments obtaining the same results as in a hands-on lab.

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that allows students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. Federations of remote laboratories have existed for years: they are based on enabling two universities to exchange remote laboratories directly, without registering students of the latter on the former university. Integration of remote laboratories on Learning Management Systems (LMS) or Content Management Systems (CMS) have also been addressed in the past, enabling institutions to delegate the authentication or authorization of the experiments to the LMS/CMS. However, these integrations are usually achieved in an ad hoc way, integrating each particular laboratory to a LMS/CMS. This contribution studies the use of federation models to integrate remote laboratory management systems in LMS/CMSs, since both approaches (integrating a laboratory on an a external electronic learning tool, and integrating a laboratory on other laboratory) are essentially equivalent. The contribution defines two case studies to evaluate this approach, showing how this integration is achieved on a LMS (Moodle) and on a CMS (Joomla).

Until a few decades ago, face to face classrooms and hand-on laboratories were the common solution for teaching theory and practice. But, new e-Learning tools have emerged and learning methodologies such as blended and distance learning have taken an important space in learning initiatives. Among them are virtual and remote Labs which provide student with a learning environment where can carry out the experiments through Internet and acquire the needed skills to develop his future jobs. This paper describes the importance of virtual and remote labs and their usage in learning scenarios.

An educational remote laboratory is a software and hardware tool that enables students to remotely access real equipment located in the university as if they were in a hands-on-lab session. In order to be able to increase the curricula of universities, software infrastructures and toolkits that make the development and maintenance of remote laboratories easier arose, such as the MIT iLab project, the Labshare Sahara project, or WebLab-Deusto. Making different systems collaborate at infrastructure level is highly desirable so as to successfully share laboratories with different characteristics. This contribution summarizes the integration of WebLab-Deusto laboratories inside the iLab Shared Architecture, as well as the integration of iLab batch laboratories inside WebLab-Deusto.

Practical sessions are the backbone of qualification in engineering education. It leads to a better understanding and allows mastering scientific concepts and theories. The lack of the availability of practical sessions at many universities and institutions owing to the cost and the unavailability of instructors the most of the time caused a significant decline in experimentation in engineering education over the last decades. Recently, with the progress of computer-based learning, remote laboratories have been proven to be the best alternative to the traditional ones, regarding to its low cost and ubiquity. Some universities have already started to deploy remote labs in their practical sessions. This contribution compiles diverse experiences based on the deployment of the remote laboratory, Virtual Instrument Systems in Reality (VISIR), on the practices of undergraduate engineering grades at various universities within the VISIR community. It aims to show the impact of its usage on engineering education concerning the assessments of students and teachers as well.

The paper shows the results of an integration of the remote laboratory WebLab-Deusto-PLD at the "Programmable Logic" course of the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Deusto (Spain). Presented herein is a technical overview of the laboratory, a description of access to it, and an analysis of the user experience derived from conducted surveys since 2004. The surveys' analysis shows a correlation between two advantages of the remote experimentation: efficiency/usefulness and immersion/control. The prospective work includes an improving the WebLab-Deusto usability, an extension of the capabilities of the overall system and further its implementation in curricula.

This paper presents a new generation of warehouse robots [1] based on micro-servers and web 2.0 technologies [2]. This new technology provides a total integration with ERP software systems and with a real-time Ethernet network [3], which transports all the communications among the robots. Furthermore, micro-servers turn field devices into intelligent ones, decentralizing all the system and making accessibility and remote configuration of the robot easier, because it does by native way. This novel technology offers a faster, more robust and ecologic service than the classic solutions. A robotic industrial installation has been built, installed and checked successfully. The supervisory and control software is free and based on Web 2.0 technologies. This paper presents a new paradigm for classic architecture applied for robot control [4] and general automations.

The remote labs or WebLabs promote the experimentation in the studies of engineering allowing the access and control of real laboratory equipment through Internet. In general a WebLab is a client-server application where the client application can only be used from a PC, and it is not considered the use of mobile devices as potential clients. This is due to the fact that the WebLabs are designed from the hardware point of view, and not from the software engineering point of view. Any WebLab can be designed and implemented to be accessed using a mobile device, but only the AJAX technology can provide a unique solution for a wide range of platforms, including mobile devices. This work compares the different strategies to include mobile devices in remote labs and describes the benefits of using the AJAX approach.

The design of WebLabs has traditionally been focused on the hardware rather than the software side. However, paying more importance to the software side can bring about important improvements: richer collaboration among group members, better scalability, securer access and more natural anywhere at anytime access to the remote lab. Regarding this latter issue, enabling a user to access a remote WebLab not only through standard internet-connected PCs but also by means of their mobile devices can be very interesting and potentially advantageous. The core of this paper is to discuss the transformation of DeustoWebLab into a Web 2.0-compatible application accessible from mobile devices.