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People with severe disabilities may have difficulties when interacting with their home devices due to the limitations inherent to their disability. Simple home activities may even be impossible for this group of people. Although much work has been devoted to proposing new assistive technologies to improve the lives of people with disabilities, some studies have found that the abandonment of such technologies is quite high. This work presents a new assistive system based on eye tracking for controlling and monitoring a smart home, based on the Internet of Things, which was developed following concepts of user-centered design and usability. With this system, a person with severe disabilities was able to control everyday equipment in her residence, such as lamps, television, fan, and radio. In addition, her caregiver was able to monitor remotely, by Internet, her use of the system in real time. Additionally, the user interface developed here has some functionalities that allowed improving the usability of the system as a whole. The experiments were divided into two steps. In the first step, the assistive system was assembled in an actual home where tests were conducted with 29 participants without disabilities. In the second step, the system was tested with online monitoring for seven days by a person with severe disability (end-user), in her own home, not only to increase convenience and comfort, but also so that the system could be tested where it would in fact be used. At the end of both steps, all the participants answered the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, which showed that both the group of participants without disabilities and the person with severe disabilities evaluated the assistive system with mean scores of 89.9 and 92.5, respectively.

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The interest in optimization problems involving distributed generation units has grown among undergraduate and graduate students since distributed generation unit connections have been encouraged around the world, requiring efficient power system analysis tools to solve them. The available open access tools are commonly focused on transmission network analysis. On the other hand, commercial tools adapted to radial networks do not allow the students to follow the intermediary calculations and learn with them. In many cases, the students have to develop their own computational tools, which is a time-consuming activity. This paper aims to fill the gap encountered by undergraduate and graduate students when they are performing their optimization problems involving distributed generation units, presenting the advantages of a new power flow tool focused on radial electrical distribution networks with high levels of unbalanced loads which require a three-phase power flow tool to be analyzed. The use of the proposed tool allows the students focus on their research, reducing the time spent on programming, and learning about power flow analysis applied to radial networks.