Abstract According to the latest statistics, the proportion of the elderly (+65) is increasing and is expected to double within the European Union in a period of 50 years. This ageing is due to the improvement of quality of life and advances in medicine in the last decades. Gerontechnology is receiving a great deal of attention as a way of providing the elderly with sustainable products, environments, and services combining gerontology and technology. One of the most important aspects to consider by gerontechnology is the mobility/rehabilitation technologies, because there is an important relationship between mobility and the elderly's quality of life. Telerehabilitation systems have emerged to allow the elderly to perform their rehabilitation exercises remotely. However, in many cases, the proposed systems assist neither the patients nor the experts about the progress of the rehabilitation. To address this problem, we propose in this paper, a fuzzy‐semantic system for evaluating patient's physical state during the rehabilitation process based on well‐known standard for patients' evaluation. Moreover, a tool called FINE has been developed that facilitates the evaluation be accomplished in a semi‐automatic way first asking patients to carry out a set of standard tests and then inferencing their state by means of a fuzzy‐semantic approach using the data captured during the rehabilitation tasks.

A myriad of educational applications using tablets and multi-touch technology for kindergarten children have been developed in the last decade. However, despite the possible benefits of using visual prompts to communicate information to kindergarteners, these visual techniques have not been fully studied yet. This article therefore investigates kindergarten children’s abilities to understand and follow several visual prompts about how to proceed and interact in a virtual 2D world. The results show that kindergarteners are able to effectively understand several visual prompts with different communication purposes despite being used simultaneously. The results also show that the use of the evaluated visual prompts to communicate data when playing reduces the number of interferences about technical nature fostering dialogues related to the learning activity guided by the instructors or caregivers. Hence, this work is a starting point for designing dialogic learning scenarios tailored to kindergarten children.

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an essential soft skill that should be fostered from a young age. Research shows that a good way of teaching such skills is through video games; however, the success and viability of this method may be affected by the technological platform used. In this work we propose a gameful approach to train CPS skills in the form of the CPSbot framework and describe a study involving 80 primary school children on user experience and acceptance of a game, Quizbot, using three different technological platforms: two purely digital (tabletop and handheld tablets) and another based on tangible interfaces and physical spaces. The results show that physical spaces proved to be more effective than the screen-based platforms in several ways, as well as being considered more fun and easier to use by the children. Finally, we propose a set of design considerations for future gameful CPS systems based on the observations made during this study.

The use of multi-touch devices for all types of users (from children to the elderly) has grown considerably in the recent years. However, despite the huge interest in this technology there is a lack of research addressing usability studies on children with Down’s Syndrome. This article evaluates the abilities of these children (aged from 5 to 10 years) when performing a basic set of multi-touch gestures (tap, double tap, long press, drag, scale up and down, rotation) in tablet devices. The results show that regardless of their more limited motor skills, DS children are able to perform most of the evaluated multi-touch gestures with success rates close to 100% and that this technology could be fully exploited for developing applications targeted specifically at this type of user.

User-centered design applied to non-human animals is showing to be a promising research line known as Animal Computer Interaction (ACI), aimed at improving animals' wellbeing using technology. Within this research line, intelligent systems for animal entertainment could have remarkable benefits for their mental and physical wellbeing, while providing new ways of communication and amusement between humans and animals. In order to create user-centered interactive intelligent systems for animals, we first need to understand how they spontaneously interact with technology, and develop suitable mechanisms to adapt to the animals' observed interactions and preferences. Therefore, this paper describes a pioneer study on cats' preferences and behaviors with different technological devices. It also presents the design and evaluation of a promising depth-based tracking system for the detection of cats' body parts and postures. The contributions of this work lay foundations towards providing a framework for the development of future intelligent systems for animal entertainment.

The direct manipulation interaction style of multitouch technology makes it an ideal mechanism for implementing learning activities for prekindergarten children. This is feasible because recent studies have shown that users in this early age range are able to perform a complete set of basic multitouch gestures. However, it is still unknown whether applications based on this interaction style can use effective communication strategies that enable these very young users to understand the multitouch nature of the interactive content that is presented to them in their everyday educational applications. This understanding is particularly important in collaborative dialogic learning scenarios in which several children may participate under the supervision of an adult instructor and in which they need to discover interactive content. In order to answer this question, this work evaluates three approaches to communicate different touch gestures to prekindergarten users. The results obtained show, firstly, that it is possible to effectively communicate these gestures using visual cues; secondly, that animated semiotic approaches are more effective and learnable than iconic approaches and, finally, that gender differences exist in some gestures due to visual–spatial cognition development differences.

This work introduces a Multi-Display Environment (MDE) based on handheld devices to build tabletop-like experiences in an affordable, scalable, and simple way to foster collaboration in educational settings.

The use of robots as an educational tool is particularly interesting because of their potential to support collaboration, their capability to trigger physical activity and their inherent attractiveness. However, despite their many benefits, few works have considered the use of robots with children aged under 6 years and those which are targeted at these very young children do not fully exploit the technology, since the designed robots are fixed in one spot and do not support collaborative and cooperative instruction. This paper therefore evaluates the usability of a tangible-mediated robot with eighty-six kindergarten children (2 to 6 years old) which was designed for collaborative kindergarten instruction. The results obtained proved the suitability of the proposed platform for children from the age of 3 years and lays the foundation for developing new learning activities based on this technology for early childhood instruction.

Several studies have shown the suitability of the direct manipulation style and the multi-touch technology for kindergarteners and, as a result, direct dragging has been established as the standard way of interaction when supporting drag manipulations for them. However, there are scenarios in which direct dragging is not appropriate. For example, when the object to be dragged has to move at a fixed speed or performing an animation independent of the actual direct movement speed or trajectory of the user's hand. However, nobody has yet explored the suitability of indirect dragging interaction mechanisms that allow designers to effectively implement these scenarios. This paper evaluates different mechanisms of indirect dragging manipulations (Tap-based, Accelerometer-based and Buttons-based) in order to identify those that could be used by kindergarteners in scenarios where the direct dragging is not suitable. The results show that even though kindergarten children are able to effectively use different types of indirect dragging techniques, some considerations in terms of completion time and precision must be taken into account.

Entertainment technology increases children's engagement in educational activities designed to develop abilities ranging from collaborative problem-solving and cognitive attention to self-esteem. However, little research has been done on designing educational and entertaining interactive technology for kindergarten children (up to 5 years old). Furthermore, most of the work in this area has considered traditional input devices such as the mouse and keyboard, which are not suitable for these very young children. More recently, other more intuitive means of interaction (touch and tangible interfaces) and advanced educational artifacts such as robots have emerged. In this work we therefore present a joint collaboration between technologists and kindergarten instructors to design and evaluate a technological platform using a mobile robot for kindergarten instruction, as well as an intuitive and user-friendly tangible user interface. The results obtained suggest the platform is not only usable by kindergarten children, but it also allows them to be fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In addition, the instructors reported that the system was well accepted and praised its versatility in use as a supporting tool for their everyday classroom activities.

Digital games for animals within Animal Computer Interaction are usually single-device oriented, however richer interactions could be delivered by considering multimodal environments and expanding the number of technological elements involved. In these playful ecosystems, animals could be either alone or accompanied by human beings, but in both cases the system should react properly to the interactions of all the players, creating more engaging and natural games. Technologically-mediated playful scenarios for animals will therefore require contextual information about the game participants, such as their location or body posture, in order to suitably adapt the system reactions. This paper presents a depth-based tracking system for cats capable of detecting their location, body posture and field of view. The proposed system could also be extended to locate and detect human gestures and track small robots, becoming a promising component in the creation of intelligent interspecies playful environments.

Kiteracy is an educational kit designed to improve the literacy process of children with Down syndrome by enabling higher levels of interaction. The kit is based on two Spanish literacy methods: global and phonics. In this work, we present a qualitative study based on video-recorded sessions with twelve children from a Down syndrome institution. The study analyzes three forms of interactions: cardboard, multi-touch and tangible. The task carried out by special education teachers and children in the experimental sessions involved working in pairs (Teacher-child) and autonomous self-learning (child only). Through the sessions, we identified situations in which the teacher took the control in the cardboard version. In the multi-touch version, both the teacher and the child shared the control. However in the tangible version the child took the control. In the self-learning sessions, we observed that multi-touch and tangible interaction seems to offer an enjoyable time for children. Surveys and interviews with teachers revealed that tangible objects offered greater adaptability to create playful reading strategies.

Ant Colony Optimization has proven to be an important optimization technique. It has provided a solid base for solving classical computational problems, networks routing problems and many others. Nonetheless, algorithms within the Ant Colony metaheuristic have been shown to struggle to reach the global optimum of the search space, with only a few select ones guaranteed to reach it at all. On the other hand, Ant Colony based hybrid solutions that address this issue suffer from either severely decreased efficiency or low scalability and are usually static and custom-made, with only one particular use. In this paper we present a generic and robust solution to this problem, restricted rigorously to the Ant Colony Optimization paradigm, named Angry Ant Framework. It adds a new dimension - a dynamic, biologically-inspired pheromone stratification, which we hope can become the objective of further state-of-the-art research. We present a series of experiments to enable a discussion on the benefits provided by this new framework. In particular, we show that Angry Ant Framework increases the efficiency, while at the same time improving the flexibility, the adaptability and the scalability with a very low computational investment.

The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) has been a very resourceful metaheuristic over the past decade and it has been successfully used to approximately solve many static NP-Hard problems. There is a limit, however, of its applicability in the field of p2p networks; derived from the fact that such networks have the potential to evolve constantly and at a high pace, rendering the already-established results useless. In this paper we approach the problem by proposing a generic knowledge diffusion mechanism that extends the classical ACO paradigm to better deal with the p2p's dynamic nature. Focusing initially on the appearance of new resources in the network we have shown that it is possible to increase the efficiency of ant routing by a significant margin.

Creativity is a relevant characteristic for people's development as it facilitates the generation of new ideas and innovation processes. Although technology has played an important role on creativity stimulation, it still needs to be explored for a better understanding and support in the context of information and communication technologies. In this paper a basic creativity assessment model is presented and an empirical study has been conducted whose aim is to get insight into whether an interactive surface as base technology for collaborative creative tasks is promising in terms of both collaboration and creativity traits. In the study two tabletop-based platforms (a digitally-augmented, and a physical-only without computer mediation) were involved to solve a problem consisting of creating Rube-Goldberg machines. From these experiments, we have observed that in terms of creativity traits, interactive surfaces seem promising as groups working in the digital platform showed significantly more performance in fluency of thinking, were more motivated, and novelty was found near to significance. Also some issues related to collaboration and interaction were analyzed. In particular, the co-operation, the retrial fine adjustment, and the dominance showed that the properties of an interactive surface tabletop suits better for facilitating the sharing of objects and participation in conditions of co-operation by co-located participants.

Departing from creative learning foundations, this paper discusses on the suitability of interactive tables as a grounding technology to support creative learning for several reasons: support for social learning, because the subjects share a physical space as in traditional non-digital technologies, communication during the creative, experimental and reflexive process is direct and not computer-mediated, and subjects can carry out the task in parallel on the same surface. Considering reflection, discussion and creation processes in a loop, an experiment with teenagers has been conducted comparing a digital-based against a pure tangible tabletop in a task of creating entities consisting of blocks and joint elements. This preliminary study, designed to obtain initial insights about whether the grounding technology may become a promising tool to support creative learning, explores some aspects such as productivity, complexity of designs and concurrent co-manipulation. The results showed that subjects were more productive in terms of the number of solutions obtained using the non computer-mediated approach. However using the digital tabletop approach subjects design, on average, more complex or elaborate solutions in terms of the number of involved bodies and joints. Finally, an important finding was that teams established more frequently concurrent cooperation schemes in the digital tabletop condition by sharing more effectively the creation space.

Ant colony optimization (ACO) is being used to solve many combinatorial problems. However, existing implementations fail to solve large instances of problems effectively. In this paper we propose two ACO implementations that use graphical processing units to support the needed computation. We also provide experimental results by solving several instances of the well-known orienteering problem to show their features, emphasizing the good properties that make these implementations extremely competitive versus parallel approaches.

In this paper we propose a distributed ant colony algorithm to solve large scale orienteering problem instances. Our approach is based on a multi-colony strategy where each colony works in an independent portion (cluster) in the original graph. This results in no need for communicating pheromones information among colonies and in increasing speedup. We have implemented our algorithm as a .NET Web services infrastructure following a grid computing philosophy and we provide some promising experimental results to show the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach

Data Grids are currently proposed solutions to large scale data management problems including efficient file transfer and replication. Large amounts of data and the world-wide distribution of data stores contribute to the complexity of the data management challenge. Recent architecture proposals and prototypes deal with replication of read-only files but do not address the replica synchronisation problem. We propose a new Grid service, called Grid Consistency Service (GCS), that sits on top of existing Data Grid services and allows for replica update synchronisation and consistency maintenance. We give models for different levels of consistency provided to the Grid user and discuss how they can be included into a replica consistency service for a Data Grid. 1