Dr. Rossel-Cid, Pedro

Software Product Lines allow creating a set of applications that share a set of common features. This makes software product lines appropriate for implementing a family of software products when each stakeholder has different needs and requirements evolve constantly. In the case of emergency management, firefighters have begun using their own smartphones to collaborate and access information during emergencies. However, each firefighter role requires different information and the firefighters’ requirements are constantly evolving. We propose a well-defined process to help stakeholders in this domain specify the products they require, showing that it is possible to apply this software engineering process to extract collaborative requirements common to a set of applications. To confirm whether it was useful for real software implementation, we defined and implemented two applications for this domain. This paper presents the process used to systematically define the domain model and determine the domain scope, which may be used for other domains. We found the process to be appropriate for identifying features related to the domain and its collaborative aspects. The results are promising; the process allowed us to create two working applications which were positively received by two types of stakeholders.

Context: Software Product Lines (SPL) evolve when there are changes in the requirements, product structure or the technology being used. Different approaches have been proposed for managing SPL assets and some also address how evolution affects these assets. Existing mapping studies have focused on specific aspects of SPL evolution, but there is no cohesive body of work that gives an overview of the area as a whole. Objective: The goals of this work are to review the characteristics of the approaches reported as supporting SPL evolution, and to synthesize the evidence provided by primary studies about the nature of their processes, as well as how they are reported and validated. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review, considering six research questions formulated to evaluate evolution approaches for SPL. We considered journal, conference and workshop papers published up until March 2017 in leading digital libraries for computer science. Results: After a thorough analysis of the papers retrieved from the digital libraries, we ended up with a set of 60 primary studies. Feature models are widely used to represent SPLs, so feature evolution is frequently addressed. Other assets are less frequently addressed. The area has matured over time: papers presenting more rigorous work are becoming more common. The processes used to support SPL evolution are systematic, but with a low level of automation. Conclusions: Our research shows that there is no consensus about SPL formalization, what assets can evolve, nor how and when these evolve. Case studies are quite popular, but few industrial-sized case studies are publicly available. Also, few of the proposed techniques offer tool support. We believe that the SPL community needs to work together to improve the state of the art, creating methods and tools that support SPL evolution in a more comparable manner.

Balance is affected in numerous neurologic disorders, like stroke, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease contributing to falls, and diminishing quality of life and functionality. The mini-BESTest is one of the most recommended scales to detect balance disorders in people with Parkinson’s disease, which has solid psychometric properties. Unfortunately, this scale has not been validated in Chile and there are no other validated scales that can determine balance disorders in patients with Parkinson’s disease to date. The study objective was to validate the mini-BESTest scale in Chilean Parkinson’s disease patients. The translation and adaptation to Chilean Spanish of the mini-BESTest scale were made following a cross-cultural adaptation process, to then obtain face and content validity by an expert committee. Afterwards, the demographic data and psychometric properties of internal consistency and ceiling and floor effects were measured with a sample of 50 subjects with Parkinson’s disease. Furthermore, 10 subjects of the sample were evaluated with the purpose of measuring inter rater reliability. The scale presented a good internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.845), and an excellent inter rater reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.97), no ceiling or floor effects were found. The results of the face and content validity and psychometric properties are adequate, achieving the validation of the mini-BESTest scale for balance in Chilean people with Parkinson’s disease.

Emotional information is complex to manage by humans and computers alike, so it is difficult for users to express emotional information through technology. Two main approaches are used to gather this type of information: objective (e.g. through sensors or facial recognition) and subjective (reports by users themselves). Subjective methods are less intrusive and may be more accurate, although users may fail to report their emotions or not be entirely truthful about them. The goal of this study is to identify trends in the area of interfaces for the self-report of human emotions, under-served populations of users, and avenues of future research. A systematic literature review was conducted on six search engines, resulting in a set of 863 papers, which were filtered in a systematic way until we established a corpus of 40 papers. We studied the technologies used for emotional self-report as well as the issues regarding these technologies, such as privacy, interaction mechanisms, and how they are evaluated.

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.

Background: Monitoring of patients may decrease treatment costs and improve quality of care. Pain is the most common health problem that people seek help for in hospitals. Therefore, monitoring patients with pain may have significant impact in improving treatment. Several studies have studied factors affecting pain; however, no previous study has reviewed the contextual information that a monitoring system may capture to characterize a patient’s situation. Objective: The objective of this study was to conduct a systematic review to (1) determine what types of technologies have been used to monitor adults with pain, and (2) construct a model of the context information that may be used to implement apps and devices aimed at monitoring adults with pain. Methods: A literature search (2005-2015) was conducted in electronic databases pertaining to medical and computer science literature (PubMed, Science Direct, ACM Digital Library, and IEEE Xplore) using a defined search string. Article selection was done through a process of removing duplicates, analyzing title and abstract, and then reviewing the full text of the article. Results: In the final analysis, 87 articles were included and 53 of them (61%) used technologies to collect contextual information. A total of 49 types of context information were found and a five-dimension (activity, identity, wellness, environment, physiological) model of context information to monitor adults with pain was proposed, expanding on a previous model. Most technological interfaces for pain monitoring were wearable, possibly because they can be used in more realistic contexts. Few studies focused on older adults, creating a relevant avenue of research on how to create devices for users that may have impaired cognitive skills or low digital literacy. Conclusions: The design of monitoring devices and interfaces for adults with pain must deal with the challenge of selecting relevant contextual information to understand the user’s situation, and not overburdening or inconveniencing users with information requests. A model of contextual information may be used by researchers to choose possible contextual information that may be monitored during studies on adults with pain.

Diary studies are used to gather user information in their natural context. Despite the advantages of digital diaries, older users are not able to fully beneft from them, e.g. due to decreased motor and cognitive abilities, and low digital skills. This work presents InMyDay, a digital diary application specifcally designed and implemented for older users. The goal of this work is twofold: frst, we research whether older users are able to record activities and refect on their emotions using a digital diary. Then, using the results of this frst phase, we implemented three input styles for the second version of the digital diary: voice, stylus, and keyboard. Overall, 23 older users participated in evaluations aimed at improving the design of the diary and understanding their input style preferences. We found that the older adults used the diary to refect on their emotions, registering positive as well as negative emotions. We also found that the variety of choices in input styles helped the participants select the option most suited to their particular needs and preferences. Future work will focus on evaluating the digital diary over a longer period of time, to analyze variables such as long-term adoption and motivation, as well as trends in the selection of input styles.