OBJECTIVE To asses how people with mental disorders experience their special needs and interact with the community in public urban places. METHODOLOGY The research was performed in the city of Passo Fundo, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, using ethnography as the theoretical methodological approach. As of the study of one subject, the objective was to understand what characterizes people as mentall...

Making information on the Web accessible to all people, including to those having special needs, has become a necessity because of various legal obligations. Information may not be accessible by people with special needs because many Websites are not designed for viewing with alternative technologies. Aesthetic appearance of Websites, as displayed by common technologies, is often more favourabl...

Human rights are the basic standards that people need to live in dignity. In addition to the rights that are available to all people, there are rights that apply only to children. Children need special rights because of their unique needs; they need additional protection that adults don’t. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international document that sets out all of...

The development of smart devices and software techniques within the fields of ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence offers new interesting opportunities for elder, disabled, and chronically-ill people. This paper presents a multiagent architectural solution, called environmental agency, for the flexible cooperation and coordination of the devices pervading an environment in order to sat...

Bereavement support is an integral part of palliative care. Grieving after loss is a normal process; however, some grief reactions become complicated and may seriously compromise the health of an individual. Routine bereavement care helps identify people at risk of complicated grieving. The burden of grief can last for years, sometimes indefinitely. People caring for the bereaved need to pay sp...

Dependent people have a great variability in their needs and levels of motor and/or cognitive handicap. Hence they call for personalized services, especially when interacting with their environment. In smart homes, the Semantic Matching Framework (SMF) provides an appropriate middleware for delivering personalized assistive services in line with the disabilities of a user. SMF is a system based...