The application of ubiquitous technologies in the improvement of education strategies is called ubiquitous learning. This strategy amplifies the pedagogical potential of e-learning through a ubiquitous and contextualized perspective. On the other hand, a ubiquitous technological mediation in learning can also increase the isolation of learners and reduce the integration among colleagues. Strategies to encourage the group learning can minimize these possible side effects. In this sense, this article proposes UbiGroup, an agent-based model for ubiquitous recommendation of educational contents for groups of learners. UbiGroup aims to help teachers to search, select and distribute educational materials for groups. The model considers the group profile and the context where learners are. The recommendation for dynamic groups of learners through a consensus profile is the main scientific contribution of this research. The model was evaluated through simulated scenarios. The results were encouraging and show potential for implementing UbiGroup in real learning environments.
People with disabilities and the elderly face difficulties to fulfill their accessibility needs in their daily life routines, mainly when they have an emergency demanding speedy and specific assistance. This article proposes the SafeFollowing, a collaborative model to help people with disabilities and the elderly in smart assistive cities. The main contribution of this work is the specification of a decentralized model of ubiquitous accessibility, which involves public agents and volunteers to attend the users’ requests. SafeFollowing also allows the use of police vehicles mapping, in order to provide a specific follow-up in adverse situations of daily life. The model was validated through experiments in real case scenarios by 14 public agents and 11 elderly and people with disabilities. The results showed that 100% of evaluators (users and agents) stated that the model was useful and 82% of users and 100% of agents considered that SafeFollowing was easy to use. The experiments also allowed the learning of 5 relevant lessons on technological and usability aspects of SafeFollowing that are recorded in this article.
In the last survey about the Brazilian population conducted by IBGE, more than 45.6 million of Brazilians declared that they have some kind of disability. Besides that, the same survey revealed that the number of elderly people has been increasing over the years and at that time it already represented 12.1 \% of the total. In this scenario, public policies that can efficiently ensure the rights of this share of the population became even more necessary. In the same manner, with the popularization of mobile devices, opportunities to develop new solutions are arising, offering more independence and quality of life to them. Ubiquitous accessibility support solutions have been proposed, such as the MASC model, which resorts to the concept of smart assistive city; and more recently the AccompCare, which predicts the monitoring of people with disabilities and the elderly. This article proposes the SafeFollowing, a model that enables integrated and collaborative acting of the community aiming to assist people with some kind of disability or elderly people. The SafeFollowing predicts the use of police cars mapping, in order to provide a specific follow-up in adverse daily situations. The validation of the model is also presented in the article, which was performed through experiments in real test scenarios.
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