Abstract
The visual impaired are a specific minority group that can benefit from specific assistive systems in order to mitigate their mobility and accessibility constrains. In the last decade, our research group has been integrating and developing assistive technologies, focused in human-computer interaction, artificial vision, assisted navigation, pervasive computing, among others. Several projects and prototypes have been developed with the main objective of improving the blind's autonomy, mobility, and quality of life. Currently the technology has reached a maturation point that allows the development of systems based on video capturing, image recognition and location referencing, which are key for providing features of artificial vision, assisted navigation and spatial perception. The miniaturization of electronics can be used to create devices such as electronic canes that equipped with sensors can provide so much more contextual information to a blind user. The adoption of these systems is dependent of an information catalogue regarding points of interest and their physical location reference. In this paper we describe the current work on assistive systems for the blind and propose a new perspective on using the base information of those systems to provide new services to the general public. By bridging the gap between the two groups, we expect to further advance the development of the current systems and contribute to their economic sustainability.

Abstract
Digital systems and solutions providing location based services for everyday activities are supported by geographic information systems that are typically problem-oriented. Although recently some approaches try to combine data from multiple sources to provide a better user experience, most often than not, these extra sources of input are not meaningful and act merely as an extension or augmentation of the user’s physical context, providing extra data that not always adds extra value to the service. In this work, a geographic information system that provides valuable data for multiple audiences, with different restrictions and requirements, is presented. This work also presents the concept of ‘awareness’, implemented using a hierarchical layering system. Using lists of information layers, together with an appropriate categorization of user requirements, the proposed information system can feed different final applications with different data, for different types of users, promoting accessibility and universal access. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract
Aging is a process inherent to the human condition and part of the human being’s life cycle, which can be degraded by the reduction in the individual’s physical and social activity. This problem can be augmented by the context in which the person is aging, e.g., family, health and social bonds. The elderly individuals’ well-being is related to the strength of their social bonds with their family and friends group, which can be difficult to maintain in some stages of the aging process. A, recently- proposed solution is the adoption of autonomous systems capable of autonomous interactions with the elderly. Such systems are designed to be able to interpret the individual’s state of mind and the current context in order to conduct an effective interaction with the elderly person. This study focuses on the interaction design between the autonomous system and the human person, by considering the elderly individual’s context and pursuing the type of interaction that will positively influence the reinforcement or maintenance of the person’s social bonds with the family and friends groups. The study was carried out by interviewing a group of elderly people, currently living in nursing homes and with limited access to their family and friends. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract
In this work it is presented a system to help the users to maintain an active lifestyle. Our main objective is to evaluate the current mobile technologies for the development of systems to monitor the users' health and to promote a healthy lifestyle. It was developed a full system, including: an application for smartwatch; an application for smartphone; a back-end with a webservice in PHP. The application provides the functionalities to acquire the user's: heart rate; location, based on the GPS position; the number of steps; the position's elevation; etc. The back-end is used to register the data acquired and processed by the applications. The design was user centric and the development methodology was based on the agile paradigm, for which are described three development iterations.

Abstract
This paper presents the evolution of the process for management of surgery waiting lists in the Portuguese public hospital network. We use the perspective of the software development and deployment by UTAD, as a partner of the Ministry of Health, to create an information system to manage list recovery programs. We describe the early status and work, when data harvesting was the core challenge, up to the current automated situation. This paper bridges the PERLE, PPMA, PECLEC and SIGIC programmes, and concludes with lessons learned and suggestions for evolution of the process.

Abstract
In this paper it is presented a music application for people with intellectual disabilities, called "Professor Piano". We created this application to be a solution for music education for this group of people. For that we present the development and implementation of the app. We choose the virtual piano and the mobile devices as the basis for our solution. It was conducted an assessment of the current status and features of mobile applications also using this paradigm, from which we concluded that, currently, there is not a virtual piano application oriented to people with intellectual disabilities so we design, develop and tested a new application, the "Professor Piano". To validate the "Professor Piano" application approach, we evaluated the application usage by a group of people with intellectual disabilities, without having too much user experience with mobile technologies, with the aim to measure the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. We registered the following variables: success in a conclusion of a level (effectiveness); the percentage of correct notes played versus all notes of that level (efficiency); and the motivation at the end of the experience (satisfaction). The results obtained shows the interest and motivation of the users in playing with the application. In the four tests, three persons completed and wanted to continue the testing experience. This results also shows the importance of using an intuitive design and also of displaying the score at the end of each level, giving an extra boost to the user to replay or advance to the next level. © 2016 ACM.