Dr. Rossel-Cid, Pedro

Technology can improve university students’ communication, helping them maintain relationships. Although there are many available technological tools, students face challenges—e.g., living far from home, failing grades, depression—that may isolate them from their networks. Most research into these topics has been conducted in countries in which students leave their parents’ home while at university, which is not the case for most students in southern Chile. In this context that has been seldom studied, this paper presents two studies, focusing on two research questions: (1) How do university students in southern Chile communicate? (2) Can a mobile application persuade university students to increase their communication patterns? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey with 90 students in southern Chile, and then developed a persuasive application called Social+Me, aimed at monitoring communication with students’ support networks and persuading them to keep in touch. We conducted a preliminary evaluation of Social+Me, and the application was well received by participants, who felt that it improved their communication with their social network. The main impact of our study lies in applying persuasive technologies to the communicative practice of university students to prevent students from feeling isolated or unsupported.

Several initiatives have implemented collaborative applications for mobile settings as diverse as hospital work, wildlife, transportation, and museums. The changing nature of mobile technology has resulted in a wide variety of applications. We explored models, architectures, and applications developed in the past 13 years to categorize the types of existing software and extract a set of common core requirements that support mobile collaboration independently of the current technology. This paper provides an analysis of the domain of mobile collaborative systems including a proposal division into several domains of use, and a study of the types of systems that exist in each of them. In this way, developers can analyze their scenario of development to get an idea of the most important requirements that should be considered for development.

Aging is associated with a progressive decline in health, resulting in increased medical care and costs. Mobile technology may facilitate health self-management, thus increasing the quality of care and reducing costs. Although the development of technology offers opportunities in monitoring the health of older adults, it is not clear whether these technologies allow older adults to manage their health data themselves. This paper presents a review of the literature on mobile health technologies for older adults, focusing on whether these technologies enable the visualization of monitored data and the self-reporting of additional information by the older adults. The systematic search considered studies published between 2009 and 2019 in five online databases. We screened 609 articles and identified 95 that met our inclusion and exclusion criteria. Smartphones and tablets are the most frequently reported technology for older adults to enter additional data to the one that is monitored automatically. The recorded information is displayed on the monitoring device and screens of external devices such as computers. Future designs of mobile health technology should allow older users to enter additional information and visualize data; this could enable them to understand their own data as well as improve their experience with technology.