In emergent economies such as Mexican, most schools lack resources to cover or develop programs when teachers assess children with special needs. Teaching practice for children with learning difficulties require, for instance, welltrained therapists, special learning materials, adequate classroom settings, and supportive technology equipment. KAPEAN is a software tool that offers a set of educational activities that can help therapists organize interventions with children where attention, memory, visouspatial, and reasoning skills are reinforced. Data collected from the participant's experiences is processed in order to get insights of the performance and concentration exposed by children. Results inform that there are activities with a higher level of difficulty than others regarding cognition and interactional experience. The activity demanding memory skills was especially difficult for all of the participants. It was also found that the level of concentration children have when developing a task might be influencing their performance.

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The home of the future will be able to offer comfortable, safe and supportive home spaces. Smart systems and artefacts will know users’ routines and anticipate their needs. While the vision of the home of the future is promissory, it is the user who supports UbiComp systems, but certain technical and social challenges must be addressed before the smart home can become a reality. Unexpected human behavior makes it difficult to identify and predict domestic activity. Thus, if a system is not reliable or trusted enough to take actions on behalf of users, context-aware designs must allow for user participation to support the systems’ performance. In this article, the authors use their experience designing a context-aware system to illustrate how the users’ “touch”, that is, their active involvement, is still a requirement for today’s UbiComp designs. The configurable system described supports parents awareness of their children’s activity. Responses from a user study indicate that parents engaged positively with this kind of mediated, rather than proactive, computing-based support.

The vision of the home of the future considers the existence of smart spaces saturated with computing and pervasive technology, yet so gracefully integrated with users. Sensing technology and intelligent agents will allow the smart home to empower dwellers lifestyle. In today’s homes, however, the exploration of pervasive and ubiquitous systems is still challenging. Lessons from past experiences have shown that social and technology issues have affected the implementation of pervasive computing environments that “fade into the background”, and of supportive applications that disappear from user’s consciousness. This paper presents our experience with the exploration of a pervasive system that aims to complement a parent’s awareness of their children’s activity in situations of concurrent attendance of household and childcare. To minimize issues such as sensing reliability and variations with parenting needs around this kind of pervasive support, parents are enabled to configure and adapt the UbiComp system to their current needs. From responses of a user study we highlight opportunities for the system on its current status, and challenges for its future development.