Francisco J. Gutierrez

Inequalities in HIV disease management and progression in migrants from Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa living in Spain

The objective of the study was to analyse key HIV‐related outcomes in migrants originating from Latin America and the Spanish‐speaking Caribbean (LAC) or sub‐Saharan Africa (SSA) living in Spain compared with native Spaniards (NSP).

A social cloud-based tool to deal with time and media mismatch of intergenerational family communication

Social media services are increasingly used to support social interaction among young people and adults. Older adults however, are often reluctant to use social media services, and prefer to socialize through face-to-face meetings or telephone conversations. Moreover, the time periods that family members have for socializing can be different, as they may have a different schedule for conducting activities and commitments during the day. These differences in media preferences and scheduling times for socializing generate a communication asymmetry that socially isolates older adults and negatively impacts their physical and mental health. Based on the analysis of a dataset from two 21-weeks deployment studies and nine semi-structured interviews, we conducted an in-depth formative study trying to understand the communication asymmetry among older adults and their relatives. The results were used to improve the design and implementation of SocialConnector, a cloud-based application that enables older adults to conduct synchronous and asynchronous social interactions with their relatives. The usability of the new system was evaluated to determine if its services contribute to address the stated communication asymmetry. The obtained results provide evidence that the system can successfully help to alleviate the communication breakdowns led by asymmetries in media and time preferences among family members. Differences in preferred media obstruct social interaction with older adults.A mismatch in interaction rhythms also makes difficult the communication with elders.SocialConnector bridges this gap by connecting the elderly with their families.Older adults perceive low effort for socializing when using SocialConnector.

Boosting participation in virtual communities

We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social websites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our professional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, little research has been done on what drives individuals to contribute to online communities, as there is not enough empirical evidence to validate well-established models. In this research we propose to design, develop and test a set of principles and functionalities a virtual community should have in order to attempt to achieve a high degree of activity by its members. We will focus, at first, on the particular case of educational virtual communities. We would like our results to cover more of the scenarios and area regardless of its content and context.

Mom, I Do Have a Family!: Attitudes, Agreements, and Expectations on the Interaction with Chilean Older Adults

Most related research about intra-family communication follows the reality of developed countries, where older adults can live independently from their families and are likely to embrace technology. Contrarily, in Chile and other Latin American countries, most older adults live close to their families, are usually dependent of the latter, and rarely use digital means to communicate. Through cross-generational interviews, we identified attitudes, agreements, and expectations that describe how middle class Chilean families, living in urban settlements, interact with their elders. The study findings indicate that the approach used by the adult children to take care of their parents produces a vicious circle that stresses out the former and limits the technology adoption of the latter. Therefore, new ways of interacting with the elderly are required and digital technology has the potential to produce this change.

Using Human-Centric Wireless Sensor Networks to Support Personal Security

Violence and crime in large urban areas are a worldwide problem that is still open. After several attempts to reduce its occurrence and impact, there seems to be an agreement that crime preventive actions, which can be taken by citizens and security organizations, are the best way to address it. This paper proposes the use of human-centric wireless sensor networks to help address this problem, and the proposed solution is complementary to those already used by security organizations. The architecture and main components of these networks are described in detail. The article also describes a software system that implements most of the components of these networks. Such a system helps people be aware of the risks that appear to exist in a certain place at a certain time. Based on that information, citizens can take appropriate and on-time preventive actions. A preliminary evaluation of the system has been conducted, and the obtained results are also presented and discussed.

Aligning intergenerational communication patterns and rhythms in the age of social media

Social media is increasingly being used to support interaction among family members. However, differences in media preferences and interaction patterns challenge intergenerational communication. It impacts negatively on the physical and mental health of older adults. Trying to bridge such a communication asymmetry, this paper reports the primary results of an analysis conducted on an existent dataset from two 21-weeks deployment studies, along with a 3-week design study, to understand intergenerational communication mismatches among older adults and relatives. Results indicate opportunities that informed the design and implementation of the Social Connector system, a software application that allows older adults to establish synchronous and asynchronous social interactions with their relatives. The paper also describes this system and discusses the main design decisions made to try reducing the stated communication asymmetry.

It Takes at Least Two to Tango: Understanding the Cooperative Nature of Elderly Caregiving in Latin America

Most adult children take care of their parents as they become older. However, the way in which families articulate themselves to care for their older members depends on cultural and social factors, which are different across societies. Given these differences, the design of CSCW systems and related services to support informal elderly caregiving requires contextual understanding of the complex and diverse living experiences and needs of older adults. This paper presents a cross-generational study to better understand the cooperative nature of informal elderly caregiving in Chile and Argentina. The study results show that family members assume implicit roles to fulfill their duties, with practically no coordination and no visibility of the assumed commitments within the family network. This implies that the articulation of the elderly caregiving is inefficient, conflict prone, and unbalanced, where family members assume a separation of concerns based on gender and kinship relationship with the older adult.

Introducing Ambient Assisted Living Technology at the Home of the Elderly: Challenges and Lessons Learned

The promise of pervasive computing applications is to surround people with affordable, transparent and unobtrusive technology. However, several barriers including usability concerns, a lack of perceived usefulness, and low technology self-efficacy may jeopardize the successful adoption of ambient assisted living AAL systems, particularly by the elderly. Following the development of the SocialConnector system, which mediates and coordinates the communication effort of family members with their elders, this paper describes the iterative design process conducted to help improve the acceptance of the system by end-users. This process considered the implicit and explicit concerns and expectations of the intended target users, and it involved three improvement cycles along an action research approach. Through this process, we obtained a set of lessons learned that aim to describe how to unobtrusively introduce sensing and monitoring technology at the home of the elderly. Keeping simple yet meaningful interaction metaphors helps increase the learnability and perceived usefulness of AAL technology by the elderly.If older adults perceive the value of having such kinds of tools installed in their homes, then they are prone to assume them as part of their lives. Likewise, situational and activity awareness mechanisms, such as visual notification badges and audio-enhanced user interfaces, can be used to persuade the elderly to approach the system and eventually use it. Finally, the design of AAL solutions also requires active consideration of the needs and attitudes of other family members, particularly those who assume an active role in the caring process of their elders.

Enhancing the Reading Experience through User-Generated Serious Games on the MyGame-4u Platform

The characteristics of generation Z, or the digital generation, have led us to rethink our pedagogy for bringing challenging literature into the classroom. Our research is based on creating a serious game platform in collaboration with a team of students who were involved both in the programming and testing of our platform called MyGame-4u. This platform allows students to share contributor-generated games in the field of literature. Using the Bloom taxonomy of learning objectives, our team of researchers developed a bank of question templates for the platform corresponding to the five levels of learning in the taxonomy. This paper also refers to the findings of techno-culture theorists in relation to the generation Z profile as well as Csikszentmihalyi’s eight dimensions of the flow experience. Having tested MyGame-4u, we believe that such tools can help students break down the reading activity into achievable tasks and thus allow them to develop their capacity to read and to appreciate long novels.

Sentiment-based User Profiles in Microblogging Platforms

Twitter has become one of the major platforms for self-expression in the Social Web, mostly due to its adoption by mobile users and its short message format. This presents endless possibilities for social behavior researchers that, for the first time, have access to massive amounts of data generated by humans. Nevertheless, most of the current research on emotions in social platforms focuses on reactions to particular events, or crowd behavior. In this article we present our research in the identification and characterization of user sentiment profiles in online social media. By analyzing a dataset of more than 36,000 users, we identify several distinctive groups, according to similarities in their sentiment behavior. We study differences and similarities between these profile clusters and present detailed statistics. We found that a large number of Twitter users can be grouped in nine distinct profiles according to the strength and polarity of their sentiment. Researchers and practitioners can benefit from our approach to characterize Twitter users in several scenarios, such as social recommendation, and mood estimation.