Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications aim to allow elderly, sick and disabled people to stay safely at home while collaboratively assisted by their family, friends and medical staff. In principle, AAL amalgamated with Internet of Things introduces a new healthcare connectivity paradigm that interconnects mobile apps and sensors allowing constant monitoring of the patient. By hiding technology into light fixtures, in this paper we propose AmbLEDs, a mobile ambient light sensing system, as an alternative to spreading sensors that are perceived as invasive, such as cameras, microphones, microcontrollers, tags or wearables, in order to create a crowdware ubiquitous context-aware system for recognizing, informing and alerting home environmental changes and human activities to support continuous proactive care.

This paper describes our research on feedback mechanisms of wearables for supporting indoor landmark identification in the context of blind pedestrians' mobility. It contributes with a promising alternative to audible patterns, which are consistently related to the 'masking phenomenon'. It also contributes with many lessons and insights that could benefit the designer of wearables for blind users. We started from an observational study followed by co-creation workshops with designers and potential users. The resulting prototypes were used in two Case Studies. The first study investigated the occurrence of 'masking', a problem caused by technology that affects negatively the sensorial perception of the wearer. The second study investigated the usefulness of the wearables for the identification of landmarks. The wearable succeeded in both tests for the particular context in which it was used.

Beauty Technology is a wearable computing paradigm that uses the body's surface as an interactive platform by integrating technology into beauty products applied directly to one's skin, fingernails and hair. Hairware is a Beauty Technology Prototype that connects chemically metalized hair extensions to a microcontroller turning it into an input device for triggering different objects. Hairware acts as a capacitive touch sensor that detects touch variations on hair and uses machine learning algorithms in order to recognize user's intention. Normally, while someone touches her own hair, unconsciously she is bringing comfort to herself and at the same time is emitting a non-verbal message decodable by an observer. However, when she replays that touch on Hairware, she is not just emitting a message to an observer, because touching her hair would trigger an object, creating in this way, a concealed interface to different devices. Therefore, Hairware brings the opportunity to make conscious use of an unconscious auto-contact behavior. We present Hairware's hardware and software implementation.

Looking for wearables that are fashionable, smart and augment human interaction, we introduce the term Beauty Technology as an emergent field in Wearable Computing. It is an on-body computing approach that turns non-invasive, wireless and without power required electromagnetic devices into beauty products for interacting with different surfaces and devices. This paper describes the materials and the prototyping process used in the making of Beauty Tech Nails exemplifying its application in everyday beauty products.

This paper describes a systemic approach to co-design of collaborative museums, using ethnography, co-creation workshops and fast prototyping, amongst other Social Science and Human Centered Design methods. Focused on the creation of immersive and collaborative museum experiences, it provides a rationale for involving carefully selected multidisciplinary teams and users in the entire design cycle, and presents a process that supports this task, from research to development, pointing its value and limitations. In order to bring the discussion into context and exemplify the use of a group of methods that can support collaborative design, it introduces the case of a Brazilian Planetarium and Science Museum.

With the development of new technologies, new dynamic epithelial artifacts (new tattoos) are designed, enabling new types of situated and embodied multimodal communication. New tattoos (NTs) turn the skin into a source of dynamic and reversible inscription, possibly responsive to fine-grained organic variations, and dependent on oriented local perturbation. As new aesthetic-cognitive artifacts, NTs alter the operational and semiotic dimension of the skin, transforming it into a new frame of interactive interface. This paper aims at introducing some epithelial prostheses based on new biocompatible materials and technologies.

This paper presents a human-centered vision of unmanned but crewed platforms, combining an onshore collaborative hybrid environment and an intelligent offshore oilfield. Computer science plays a major role in this vision since digital environments are paramount for the job. We discuss the importance of research in the fields of computer graphics, virtual reality and computer supported cooperative work in this context and present the basic technologies needed to accomplish the task. We instantiate our vision appointing the results of some initial experiments using virtual reality in submarine installation operations.

3D information systems for education must be investigated and adopted for a more involving form of learning. It is in this context that we propose the use of Second Life as an environment for collaborative learning and generation of new educational content. Second Life is a simulator of real life and relationships, an entirely three-dimensional virtual world. There, besides interacting with users from the whole world in real time, it is also possible to create one's own objects and businesses, and generate new alternatives of content, exchange of information, and learning.

Based on the 3C collaboration model, this article descries the mapping of a variety of collaboration forms onto inter-relationships between communication, coordination and cooperation. In order to investigate how to provide computational support for these three functional collaboration dimensions the analysis shifts from the inter-relationships between these three dimensions to their intra-relationships. Finally, Gestalt psychology principles are used to discuss the suitability of the approach to human perception.

This paper describes a case study on group programming learning that has as central components the identification of specific demands for such domain and the requirement analysis for collaborative programming learning, using the record of activities and codes developed.

This paper presents the AulaNet learning management system, its architecture and the collaboration model that guided its development and that was refined during this process. A case study of an online course indicates the necessity to have an architectural support for collaboration aspects and a collaboration-based engineering approach to groupware development. This approach, groupware engineering, is based on software engineering and on concepts originated in the field of CSCW.

This paper introduces an approach based on the 3C (communication, coordination and cooperation) collaboration model to the development of collaborative systems. The 3C model is studied by means of a detailed analysis of each of its three elements, followed by a case study of a learningware application and the methodology of a web-based course, both designed based on this model. Moreover, this paper describes a component-based system architecture following this 3C approach.

In this paper is described how computer supported cooperative work can be used to enhance project development memory, focusing on software development. The collaboration model that is presented is based upon the concepts of communication, coordination and cooperation. Each of these concepts is analyzed regarding software specification. The paper presents some examples of systems that seek to capture and refine group ideas through the process of argumentation. The paper also shows how the building of project memory can facilitate the recovery of the context and the reasoning that led to the taking of project decisions.