Lara Álvarez, Patricio
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Lara Álvarez, Patricio
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Ambato
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patolara@uti.edu.ec
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57209318452

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Building hybrid interfaces to increase interaction with young children and children with special needs

2020 , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Salvador-Ullauri, L. , Acosta-Vargas, P. , Bonilla-Jurado, Diego

Young children as well as children with special educational needs learn from their environment with social, emotional and physical stimuli. In this context, educational resources and teaching strategies play a main role for them in order to understand the new information. This paper describes the experience of building hybrid interfaces that combine technology with traditional educational resources. A total of 60 teachers divided in two groups completed some tasks which consisted of generating new educative resources with tecnology. Through Design Thinking methodology, teachers designed three hybrid interfaces: 1. Interactive books, combining traditional fairy tales books with mobile devices, where QR codes and NFC tags give life to the stories; 2. Educational Board Games, where augmented reality markers give an extra information to the players; 3. Tangible educational resources, which integrate Makey-Makey device and Scratch with fruit, clay, aluminum foil or water to build laboratory. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Development of an accessible video game to improve the understanding of the test of honey-alonso

2020 , Salvador-Ullauri, L. , Acosta-Vargas, P. , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Lara Álvarez, Patricio

When evaluating the learning styles of several individuals using the Honey-Alonso test, some users did not understand the meaning of several of the questions. This may be due to problems of context, tiredness in front of the extension of the test, lack of understanding or disinterest. The Honey-Alonso test consists of four groups of twenty questions each. Each group of questions allows identifying the level that an individual possesses on each one of the four learning styles. These styles are: active, reflective, theoretical and pragmatic. Answering a questionnaire of eighty questions is not an easy task from an andragogical point of view. This article proposes the creation of an educational video game designed with a script based on the questions of the Honey-Alonso test. The answers selected by the player are taken as a condition to determine the order of the next questions presented to the player. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Improving usability with think aloud and focus group methods. A case study: an intelligent police patrolling system (i-PAT)

2020 , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Tutillo-Sanchez, D. , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Acosta-Vargas, P. , Salvador-Ullauri, L. , Nunes, I.L.

This study proposes the use of Think Aloud and Focus Group methods for evaluating the usability of the Intelligent Police Patrolling System (I-Pat). The study was conducted with twenty-one students of computer engineering. The study included two evaluation methods. First, the application of Think Aloud using audio recordings, image capturing and questionnaires. Second, the application of a Focus Group for brainstorming. The total number of the usability problems identified was fifteen. Comprehensiveness (46%) and layout (43%) problems were the most frequently found. The study showed that the problems encountered were due to the lack of understanding of the system’s functions, so it is recommended increasing the users’ levels of knowledge about the system. The application of these methods caused the students to find a greater number of errors than when applying a single method, allowing them to generate a report with usability improvements according to the reported errors. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Accessibility assessment in mobile applications for android

2020 , Acosta-Vargas, P. , Salvador-Ullauri, L. , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Medina, A. , Nunes, I.L.

At present, the lack of adequate methods to test whether a mobile application is accessible has become a major challenge for accessibility experts. This study was applied to ten mobile applications, the most popular according to PCMAG. We propose to use the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 through manual review and automatic review with the Google Play Store Accessibility Scanner validator for the Android. The evaluation results of the mobile applications indicate that the applications are not accessible because they do not comply with the minimum required level proposed by WCAG 2.1. The research proposes suggestions to improve and raise awareness among the designers of mobile applications, in such a way that more inclusive mobile applications accessible to all types of users are built. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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IoT Monitoring for Real-Time Control of Industrial Processes

2022 , Ayala-Chauvin, Manuel Ignacio , Escudero P. , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Domènech-Mestres C.

Today’s industries require monitoring and control of all manufacturing processes. Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) systems provide a framework for integrating production systems. In this regard, the Internet of things (IoT) has rapidly evolved to digitize and interconnect devices in industrial processes. However, to achieve the integration of a complete system implies high costs in software and hardware, which limits its penetration in medium and low size industries. For this reason, this project proposes the creation of a low-cost IoT platform whose objective is to monitor and analyze both physical and electrical parameters of an industrial process in real-time. To achieve this objective, the software and hardware specifications were defined and characterized, the conceptual design and detail of the prototype were made, and finally, the materialization was carried out. The platform was structured in two parts, a web video supervision module with a continuous monitoring camera ESP32-CAM and an interface that integrates the sensors that measure the physical and electrical variables of the environment. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed system in a practical machining application on a CNC machine. With the data coming from the sensors, a database was generated to analyze and create temperature versus cutting speed control models to monitor the manufacturing process. Tests were performed on several materials, and the mathematical model of the system behavior was determined for each material in order to monitor and visualize the performance in the machining process. Finally, the cost of the project complies with the specifications proposed. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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Application to guide people with visual disability on internal buildings, using beacon bluetooth positioning systems

2020 , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Salvador-Ullauri, L. , Acosta-Vargas, P. , Espinoza, W.I.

In the actuality there are many devices to help people with visual disability, at the level of mobile devices like Smart Phones, tablets, PCS, some of them increasing the size of the letter, or reading icons or maybe incorporating voice technology to read the text or to recognize the voice, these devices help to people with visual disability that they can interact and do things that people couldn’t do every day, helping their day by day, and above all do activities of interaction of man with machine. Additionally there are several applications that incorporate GPS navigation technology, for localization and geography location, one person can use navigation applications for be able to locate even using just the GPS module without the need to have internet connection, little by little this service has become very popular, it is include in autonomous cars, to be able to go to one place to another easily, just showing the destination the people are directed without the need to drive, however this system doesn’t work inside of the buildings or internal structures because the GPS signal could be lost and the navigation and obtaining the location is not accurate. The propose of this article is for the use of beacons with techniques based on the received signal strength indication (RSSI), also distance mediation techniques to calculate the exact position of the individual, solving the lost signal of GPS devices, this calculation is done using triangulation algorithms to get the localization, Additionally, it was used beacons, this devices are operate with Bluetooth technology 4.0, and by not having GPS location antenna this devices can be obtained a proximity value and distance to the beacon using UUID, and proximity, connecting to an Smart Phone device or a tablet to the connection through the Bluetooth, In addition an application was developed using Studio Android and a library called proximi.io this library is absolutely compatible with IOS and Android, this application connects to a database to determinate the position and identify the beacons, Additionally to identify the location of the individual through his Smart We use a triangulation algorithm to obtain data with greater precision it is necessary to use at least 3 beacons, to complete the study, were performed test in corridors of buildings and several places obtaining good results it could be verified that the triangulation algorithm with some improvement variants facilitates to obtain the location with greater effectiveness in general, for our purpose it was possible to determine that is feasible to use these devices in favor of people with visual disabilities, you can use many projects with beacons and applications in public places such as hospitals, airports, educational institutions, museums, shopping centers, etc.,. In short, the application is very broad and many benefits can be obtained. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Fuzzy model for back posture correction during the walk

2020 , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Bonilla-Jurado, Diego , Salvador-Ullauri L. , Acosta-Vargas P. , Calle-Jimenez T. , Lara Álvarez, Patricio

The body posture is not a purely aesthetic problem, due to it can produce a multitude of adverse effects on health, even extremities disorders (injuries) and malfunction of organs. This study focuses on the correct and incorrect detection of the position of the spine and extremities while walking. A database of three patients with lumbago and sciatica, with diagnosis of muscle tension due to poor posture while walking, has been used in this article. These patients underwent physiotherapy treatment and were later filmed taking a short walk of 2 min to see the results. This process was developed for a period of 4 weeks, divided into 2 h of physiotherapy per week and 1 h of compilation of videos with the results obtained. To detect the correct movement of each of the patients, the Kinect Xbox One device was used. It identifies all body points, alignment, speed and angles during the walk. 25 points of human body in three dimensions are detected in real time by the Kinect, which allows to generate a data collection in real time and more efficiently. With the database of patients, a pre-processing of the information is done to identify the most relevant points for our study. A fuzzy model is generated which determines maximum and minimum thresholds for the posture of the back (angle of inclination), shoulders posture (shoulders inclination with respect to the spine), head posture (inclination with respect to horizontal vision) and movement of arms. The model dynamically identifies which position is correct for the movement during the walk, and in addition, the progress that is generated during a time series. This prototype detector is used for rehabilitation of high-performance athletes and is an approximation for the correct posture during long and medium distance races, jumps, among other sports that use the walk as a basis in their workouts. This study was based on the solution of back problems in clinical patients. These preliminary tests have given excellent results in the testing phase, which validates it as an option to prevent injuries in patients with these conditions. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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Implementation of controls for insertion of accessible images in open online editors based on WCAG guidelines. Case studies: Tinymce and summernote

2020 , Sanchez-Gordon, S. , Calle-Jimenez, T. , Villarroel-Ramos J. , Jadán Guerrero, Janio , Guevara Maldonado, César Byron , Lara Álvarez, Patricio , Acosta-Vargas P. , Salvador-Ullauri L.

It is important to raise awareness among people who create web content about barriers that exist for people with visual disabilities to perceive images. This study had for purpose the implementation of features and controls for insertion of accessible images in two open online editors: TinyMCE and Summernote. TinyMCE is used in content management systems such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Summernote is an open online editor distributed under an open MIT license. The accessibility of TinyMCE was improved in the insertion of images by adding entry fields for the type of image to be inserted, long description and title. As for Summernote, in the option to insert images, entry fields were added for the type of image to be inserted, alternative text, long description and title. Controls were implemented to validate mandatory and optional fields according to the type of image. The purpose is that open online editors comply with Part B of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines. A discussion is presented about how the original code of the two open online editors was written, how image accessibility was improved and how evaluation was performed via test scenarios, automated tools and usability surveys to both content authors and blind users. The HTML code generated with both editors showed compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Blind users stated that they were able to perceive the images when interacting with web pages created with both editors. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

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