Emília Quelhas Costa

Views of disability in Portugal: ‘fado’ or citizenship?

Disability research in Portugal is scarce and often lacks the perspective of disabled people. This paper tries to bring insights from leaders of disability associations about the community of disabled people in Portugal, the barriers to their politicization and links with disabled identity. It seems that most disabled people get trapped in a tragic paradigmatic vicious cycle due to a system-induced disempowerment which is sustained by a dominant individual and remediation model that extends to families, society, policies and politicians. The disabled associative movement has been unable to reach the majority of disabled people. Suggestions are thus made in order to transform this social reality by disseminating politically aware alternative disability paradigms and the possibility of a positive disabled identity, as well as by generating societal involvement in disability as a public matter.

Combining a Tablet and an Electronic Stethoscope to Create a New Interaction Paradigm for Teaching Cardiac Auscultation

Learning cardiac auscultation is a fundamental but hard task for a medicine student, involving a combination of gesture mechanics and cardiac sounds interpretation. We aim to create a low cost simulator combining a tablet and an electronic stethoscope, thus defining a new interaction paradigm that al-lows a student to train auscultation when and where they want. In this paper we evaluate the usability of a first approach to this new paradigm using a high-fidelity prototype and its heuristic evaluation.