Abstract
Aging is a natural process that progressively introduces limitations in a person's life, which can have dramatic effects on the person's lifestyle and wellbeing and in most cases is related to the strength of the person's social bonds with the family and friends group. Therefore, it is important to maintain these bonds in the various stages of life, especially in the later life, when the individual has health limitations and may be living in a care centre. In this work, we developed an exploratory approach to the usage of ICT systems in order to autonomy assist the elderly in maintaining their social connections and relationships with family and friends. It doesn't substitutes the human care, but it should assist and encourage the elderly to preserve and develop their social activities and the relationships with their family and friends social group. We propose the design of a software system, capable of running in autonomous devices, such as, robots and other consumer appliances, enabling them to recognize and interact with the users, according to their state of mind and the specific current moment context. The interactions should be simple and focused on keeping the users engaged and informed about the current life events of their family and friends, and create the opportunities for the users to interact with the participants of those events by creating interaction proposals. On a technical level, the system should have knowledge about the user and be able to acquire and update context information from social media, video cameras, email, etc, regarding the user and the persons from his family and friends groups, in order to develop meaningful interactions with the user. An adaptive user interface would present and manage the interactions, acting as a mediator between the user and his family and friends group.

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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

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Neste artigo, é apresentada uma pesquisa-ação com o objetivo de motivar os alunos a desenvolverem suas aprendizagens de programação de computadores no ensino superior, particularmente na transição da programação de nível iniciante para a programação avançada. Para alcançar este objetivo, foi desenvolvida uma abordagem motivacional denominada SimProgramming. A partir das reflexões sobre o processo desta pesquisa, conclui-se que SimProgramming em sua aplicação ao ensino de programação de computadores em turmas intermediárias é promissor e ainda apresenta potencial para ser usado em outros contextos educacionais.;In this paper, an action research is presented to motivate students to develop their learning of computer programming in higher education, particularly in the transition from beginner to advanced programming. To achieve this goal, a motivational approach was developed called SimProgramming. From the reflections on the process of this research, it is concluded that SimProgramming in its application to the teaching of computer programming in intermediate classes is promising and still presents potential to be used in other educational contexts.

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