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Access to information and digital tools worldwide is a reality through the internet; Data in the cloud, connectivity applications, work networks, however, in the area of ​​Education we find problems when implementing a strategy of dissemination, use and application of platforms in the vulnerable sector.We speak of the vulnerable sector as the group of families that do not have access to coverage or equipment that allows access to “Information and Communication Technologies”, the statement made by UNESCO shows through an international study that; approximately 1.5 billion students could not attend school due to the COVID19 pandemic, 706 million do not have access to computers, 56 million students live where there is no mobile network coverage, with which they proposed alternatives such as radio station programs and community televisions, in addition 63 million teachers do not have the means to reach students since the doors of schools were closed in 191 countries.It is necessary to accept the educational proposals that exist and translate them into the collective reality without affecting equality of opportunity, a precise case in our proposal taking as input the educational material by the Ministry of Education of Ecuador to implement an intelligent interactive support platform as a support in the learning process directed for highly vulnerable children of the preparatory sublevel, for which the guidelines have been revised and work will be carried out in the form of knowledge modules identified as: Module scope of logical-mathematical relationships, module scope of corporal expression and motor skills , module area understanding and expression of language, module area of ​​artistic expression. These modules will be programmed with content that can be interrelated with interactive books that include a specific game so that the child interacts with the information and activities proposed, giving them instant positive feedback, an incentive to continue in the game and reach complete a unit of study, likewise intelligent interactive multimedia material will be programmed, leaving a set of tools so that the teacher can include other activities with the same virtues mentioned

According to statistics published by the Ecuadorian Ministry of Education until 2019, the education system welcomes 31,634 children and adolescents living with some type of disability; In addition, according to data from the Ecuadorian National Council for Equal Disabilities (CONADIS), 458,505 people with some degree of physical, intellectual, hearing, visual or psychosocial disabilities live in our country. With the analysis of the aforementioned data, the paper below explains the creation of an intelligent educational platform that will allow teachers and parents to improve their skills in the teaching-learning process by applying an intelligent tutoring system, that will support daily activities at school and at home, always thinking about adequate inclusion of all students in the classroom, not forgetting the support of a multidisciplinary team of experts who will provide through the system certain diagnoses and their solution. The results show excellent levels of acceptance by teachers, parents, and experts of multidisciplinary team.

According to various studies conducted in Cuenca, Ecuador, most school children with speech disorders have dyslalia pathologies. However, in Ecuador, most special education/rehabilitation centers continue to use traditional materials to carry out therapy sessions for children with dyslalia. This situation is due to the few existing tools commonly are developed in other countries (such as Spain) and not address the patient's needs (context, idiosyncrasy, and local vocabulary). For these reasons, we present an educational application that can be used by speech-language therapists during the therapy sessions (face-to-face or online). This tool is designed to be executed in both, desktop computers and embedded devices that control educational robots (such as Raspberry PI or similar boards). Currently, the application contains several exercises and activities related to the 27 phonemes of the Spanish language. In the same way, the application includes an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) module that can work with online/offline servers. To evaluate the accuracy and app features, we conducted an experiment with a team of experts in the speech-language therapy area.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that interferes with normal children's functioning or development. Children with ADHD show difficulties related to their behavior and school performance. Due to this situation, their teachers must develop assertive communication with the parents and, at the same time, deepen the children's diagnosis. However, in Ecuador, there are no real estimates about ADHD that can help conduct early and appropriate interventions on patients who present this disorder. For these reasons, school teachers do not have therapeutic and pedagogical tools to address students' needs with ADHD. In this line, it is important mentioning that teachers are the second most important educational agents in the child's life, occupying most of their time after the parents. Therefore, it is essential for providing Ecuadorian school teachers with the knowledge and skills to carry out early detection and the consequent management and support of children with ADHD (educational inclusion). Thus, the teachers will develop pedagogical techniques based on psychoeducational guides that facilitate understanding students' special educational needs. In this paper, we present an interactive educational guide for school teachers because of the foregoing. This guide relies on expert systems and quasi-experimental research to train teachers of the “La Salle” Educational Unit (Azogues city) through the application of psychoeducational workshops. The guide address the following topics: recognition, functioning, behavioral control, emotional self-regulation, and social area of children with ADHD. The pilot experiment show encouraging results and high satisfaction levels on the teachers' side.

This article presents a review of work related to therapies and tools used in fine motor stimulation in order to establish the parameters and characteristics necessary to define the creation of an interactive board with 5 different activities as an alternative therapy proposal. This board is implemented as a tool that serves as a support for therapists in sessions of fine motor stimulation in order to innovate in traditional therapies. This is possible since it is known that the use of technology allows us to create attractive and fun tools for children, who show more attention and dedication when interacting with a tool as if it were a toy. This tool is created with the intention of transforming stimulation therapies into fun gaming sessions in order to get children to carry out activities that help strengthen and stimulate the muscles necessary for correct development in their daily and school activities, which involve a digital grip, tri-digital grip, strength in the fingers and hands, hand-eye coordination, assimilation of request for activities by audios and finally motivational feedback in case children fail and positive feedback in the case of finishing the activity correctly. For therapists these tools are the fundamental basis of the sessions; that is why innovation plays a key role since the more interactive and attractive sessions, the greater openness to the experience, which originates better results.

Some of the latest studies conducted by the World Health Organization (WHO) claim that approximately 10 percent of the world’s children and young people (200 million) have a sensory, intellectual, or mental health impairment. This situation is complex because 80% of them live in developing countries. In Ecuador, the picture has become critical with the health emergency due to the COVID-19. In the same way, it is essential mentioning that children with disabilities are much more vulnerable to COVID-19. For these reasons, in this paper, we present the first development stage of an open-source platform to help specialists in the intervention of children with intellectual disabilities. The platform uses chatbots to support and provide an appropriate guide for children’s parents/caregivers, and at the same time uses the free intelligent services provided by the IBM Watson. To determine the real feasibility of implementing we tested the platform with real users, their parents, and at the same time, applied a survey with 30 professionals of special education. The achieved results are encouraging and show that the platform can be used by therapists and professionals that lost their works due to the pandemic.

The greatest learning disadvantage that children with motor difficulties present are sustained by the limitations they have to access information, the motor deficit or motor disorder is directly associated with motor difficulties, these are frequently accompanied by alterations in sensitivity, cognition, communication, perception, behavior, which does not allow starting with the regular learning process, the work proposal is to carry out an intervention in the case of a girl with motor disability, athetosic quadriplegia at the level of curricular competencies in correlation with software and hardware applying adaptations and digital ramps in search of implementing an improvement plan through the corresponding evaluation. First, a study of the state of the art is carried out in terms of the therapies used for the inclusion of children in the classrooms, then the guide of therapies that are associated is reviewed in a specific case of the girl to help with this inclusion, it is reviewed inclusive access platforms, support tools, diagnostic and intervention software and the proposal is to generate this interface for access to reading and writing, language learning, and electronic learning as a means that facilitates training, communication and interaction. It is implemented through methodological strategies to acquire the aforementioned skills through the analysis of tools to be used with the customization of hardware and software, a diagnosis is made through the competencies that have been acquired up to this phase of school preparation, a intervention plan so that the tools are coupled to the classroom and the therapies, with a view to using it at home for the assigned tasks, then an analysis of the proposal is carried out and promising advances are presented without the need for a permanence of the tool to its progress motor graph.

Nowadays, artificial intelligence is a tool widely used in several areas such as medicine, personal assistance, regular/special education, leisure, among many others. Additive manufacturing development allows designing and making innovative low-cost robotic assistants for educational inclusion processes in developing countries. There are not enough assistive technologies for special education centers in Ecuador due to the lack of resources. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe the robot AsiRo-μ (multi-purpose robotic assistant, for its Spanish name). AsiRo-μ is based on the open-source 3D printed robot Inmmov. It implements the following functionalities: hand gestures recognition, automatic speech recognition and text to speech function through the IBM Watson Cloud services, and gesture imitation. The robot aims to conduct a dialogue with the children, motivate them to carry out the exercises/rehabilitation activities, and motivate and engage them in the therapy sessions (for children with disabilities). To determine the children’s acceptance level, we carried out a pilot experiment with two groups of children. The first group consisted of 7 children with multiple disabilities (intellectual disability, Joubert syndrome, Down Syndrome, Autism, etc.), whereas in the second participated 30 children aged between 4 and 6 years (without disabilities). Each child interacted with the robot, and a group of experts evaluated the children’s perceptions.

Fine motor skills are one of the important skills in the development and preparation of children before writing since it is an activity that consists of precision and a high level of coordination based on tasks where the eye, hands and fingers are used. simultaneously. performing actions such as grip, precision and blows. A tool (board) is proposed to support the performance of fine motor activities in children with motor disorders. The tool seeks to meet the requirements set through interviews with experts and surveys conducted with teachers and children, as well as provide certain requests for communication and data collection that allow their analysis. A planned board of five activities called tweezers, precision and three types of stroke is designed, built and implemented, each of these seeks to help children to have better eye-hand coordination, as well as better coordination in fine and precise movements. Participants have a close familiarity with the tool, which allows them to gather information about their perception of both the design it offers and its use. The board is of interest to both experts and children as it allows versatility when interacting with the activities, giving the option of combining striking elements or figures for the users by adding the different visual and auditory stimuli that appear in the tool once finished. any of the activities. There is the possibility of proposing in the future an intelligent system based on neural networks, capable of taking the data and proposing the activities and the number of times they should be carried out to optimize the sessions given by the professionals, making them more efficient and effective, undoubtedly improving the fine motor skills of children who have had access to the tool.

Climate change is a global problem that is gradually beginning to show its relevance for Latin-American context. For this reason, this research has proposed the design of two 3D video games oriented towards recycling. It is worth mentioning that these are the first 2 games made in Ecuador by a university institution that aims to raise awareness of sustainable development among its student population. Under this line, the article seeks to present the technical considerations considered to promote the transversal knowledge and ecological awareness.

According to UNICEF, children and adults with disabilities are three to four times more likely to be victims of different types of violence. Some studies claim that children with disabilities suffer from sexual abuse, with a prevalence of 13.7 percent. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe an open initiative to teach blind children and youth. Our system uses a random forest regressor model to determine which exercises are appropriate for children ranging from 5 to 12 years. The educational model contains 13 educational contents related to Sexual Health and Hygiene (SHH) and five 3D models: girl, boy, teen girl, and teen boy with and without an erection. The system, as well as the educational model, were reviewed by 30 experts of special education in Cuenca, Ecuador, obtaining encouraging results.

In Ecuador, according to the National Council for Disability Equality (CONADIS, acronym in Spanish) there are 485,325 people with disabilities, being the intellectual disability the one with the highest incidence, with a prevalence of 108,312 people. In developing countries, there are still insufficient resources for teaching Sexual Health and Hygiene (SHH) to people with disabilities. Thus, it is essential to apply strategies that help teenagers with intellectual disabilities to learn about sexual health and self-care. Therefore, this article presents an educational game and an expert system called “I take care of myself” (ITaCaS) which aims to assist in the teaching of the SHH for young people with intellectual disabilities, with ages between 12 and 17 years old. The expert system helps to determine educational activities to be carried out by the teacher with the teenager, based on their profile and prior knowledge of 13 SHH educational topics. The pictures of the game were specially designed for disabled people. The proposal was validated through a study that was carried out in two special education centers with 30 experts in the field of special education. The obtained results are encouraging since they show great acceptance by the participants of this experiment.

In the last years, additive manufacturing, as well as the intelligent services provided through the cloud, have evolved quickly, providing the opportunity to develop plenty of smart tools for personal assistance. These tools are useful for different porpuses such as intelligent tutoring, support for daily-live activities of people with disabilities, to increase productivity, among many others. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a robotic assistant that relies on additive manufacturing and an intelligent chatbot that uses the services provided by the IBM® cloud. Our robot is a custom version of the Otto robot and is a multipurpose tool aimed at assisting in different situations. We conducted an experimentation process to determine the robot’s usability as well as its response regarding to speech and image recognition under noisy environments. The results show a good response in terms of speech and image recognition.

According to given facts by the Statistics and Census National Institute (INEC), the population aged 16 to 65 has problems with reading comprehension and pronunciation. In addition, much of the country’s population has not acquired reading habits since childhood that support their interest in this topic on the grounds that teachers did not lend interest in this educational aspect. In other hand, based on results obtained in the PISA-D 2018 tests in which Ecuador participated for the first time explains that in the reading it reached 49% at a level 2, these figures show us that investment in education per child must increase considerably, fostering a solid foundation in their learning. In this line, in this paper, we present a an intelligent and educational enviroment where teachers will be able to provide the necessary help to the level of need of students, who through an intuitive application, and didactic will allow them to learn while playing by improving each time their level of pronunciation and reading comprehension. The results show excellent levels of acceptance by both basic education teachers and students from 5 to 7 years old.

The scientific, technical, legal, statistical, informative and journalistic production on disability is increasingly extensive because it is one of the most relevant issues on the social agenda and this has led to public awareness has increased and institutional initiatives have proliferated. This has led to an increasing number of documents, references and data available on disability and specifically language and communication disorders, which implies that the activity of document management in this field has gained special importance. This thesaurus is available to consume them through web services and users in order to generate a useful tool for the organization, indexing and characterization of documents, applications, articles and that translates into a more adequate cataloging and a more efficient recovery based on natural language processing techniques and ontologies. Finally, the coverage of the Thesaurus of language and communication therapy is not restricted, in terms of its linguistic scope, exclusively to the Spanish language, but using translation API, language independence is generated, and it is possible to apply it to Any type of application.

Currently, millions of articles are generated around the world on different topics or areas and published in different scientific databases. Generally, access to this repository uses search tools based on keywords that generate a list of results where sequential access is applied to generate an understanding that involves a great effort of search, classification, and selection of scientific articles within an area or specific topic. That is why, in this work, an intelligent computer system is presented that allows us to automatically obtain summaries of articles based on search keywords, which is ordered hierarchically according to the content belonging to the search keywords. Finally, this work is aimed at speech therapists and initial educators so they can have new information about tools, new trends, applications, methodologies, etc. and in turn be supportive or helpful in classrooms or speech therapies.

The following topics are dealt with: computer aided instruction; educational institutions; educational courses; teaching; engineering education; further education; computer science education; human factors; Internet; educational administrative data processing.

According to the World Health organization (WHO), the children that present disabilities have more opportunities to reach a better development and quality life in the future if they receive an early therapeutic intervention. The gross and fine motor skills are strongly related to several cognitive development mainstays of children. In this line, we present a tool aimed at providing a set of interactive rehabilitation exercises delivered to children with disabilities through the support of a virtual robotic assistant. Our proposal relies on several activities described in the Gross Motor Function Measure and has been evaluated with the support of a team of experts in the special education area.

According to the UNESCO, early childhood care and education is an essential process of the children development. Early childhood is the period from birth to eight years, where the children present a remarkable growth with brain development at its peak. In developing countries such as Ecuador, currently, do not exist formal educational programs based on serious games or educational robotics. This situation is more complicated for government schools or private institutions that attend children from low-income families. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an ecosystem aimed at stimulating the early development of children from 3 to 7 years. Our proposal (named in Kiwcha “Yachasun”, learn) relies on low-cost robotic assistants (to provide kinesthetic stimuli), an expert system based on rules (to suggest educational exercises and activities for children), and serious games (to stimulate and motivate children to learn). Our ecosystem was put to the test with 60 children from low and middle-income families during real classes. The results show that children feel highly motivated to learn concepts related to language, mathematics/logic, self-awareness/autonomy, fine motor skills, and coexistence.

The latest estimates of the World Health Organization (WHO) point out that between 2015 and 2050, the proportion of the world's population over 60 years will increase from 12% to 22%. Likewise, by 2050, around 80% of senior citizens will be living in low- and middle-income countries. They tend to suffer from several disorders such as hearing loss, cataracts, refractive errors, back and neck pain and osteoarthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, depression, and dementia. Cognitive decline is one of the most complex conditions that a senior citizen can face. For this reason, this paper proposes an interactive system that delivers collaborative playful activities to senior citizens through Personal Area Networks and serious games. In the same way, the proposal incorporates electronics kits to stimulate visuomotor coordination, spatial reasoning, and visual perception. The proposal was tested on 30 senior citizens with promising results.

According to the United Nations, Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), by 2030 will need an extra 3.3 million teachers in classrooms to achieve universal primary education. This situation becomes more complicated in the case of educational inclusion of children with or without disabilities and special needs. Currently, the schools (especially those from the developing countries), urgently require trained teachers to attend children with special educational needs. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a methodological model that uses experts systems and collaborative virtual environments to support the educational inclusion of these children in regular schools. We have validated the expert system and the virtual environment with 30 professionals on special education from different areas, reaching 80% of acceptance.

To achieve a successful transition to formal schooling, children must develop a set of specific skills. These skills are closely related to three fundamental processes: motor coordination, executive function, and visuospatial abilities. Several studies have shown that visuomotor integration and mathematics exhibits ongoing reciprocity in kindergarten and first-grade children. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe an interactive box that uses fuzzy logic, mobile apps, and light indicators to stimulate the acquisition of these skills in children from 3 to 5 years. The interactive box was tested with 45 children with ages between 4 and 6 years. The results show that most of the children are totally agree with the box in different evaluation criteria.

The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that 1 in 160 children present an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the real estimation in low- and middle-income countries can be higher and currently is so far unknown. In many Latin American countries, it is essential to develop intelligent tools that can provide support during the psychological diagnosis and intervention of children with ASD. To this aim, this article presents an approach that models the most relevant elements of rehabilitation/educational activities for children with ASD and discuss how to support them through robotic assistants, mobile applications and Multi-Sensory Stimulation Environments (MSEE). The authors tested the proposed system in four different real scenarios: the perception of 47 children without ASD concerning the robotic assistant, the feasibility of using ontology-based reasoning to select therapeutic activities, the opinion of 9 experts on ASD regarding the MSSE and the perception of 36 children with ASD about the robotic assistant.

The Multi-Sensory Environments (MSEs) have the objective of improving the development of thought, intelligence, and social skills of children with and without disabilities. However, in developing countries, due to the lack of personnel and resources, the process of designing intervention plans for children with disabilities in MSEs is carried out from an empirical perspective. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a system that relies on a multi-sensory environment consisting of 7 rehabilitation modules and an expert system to automatically determine which rehabilitation activities are appropriate for children with disabilities. To this aim, the expert system uses a model based on decision trees regressors with multi-outputs and suggests a therapy plan selecting pairs activity-module (from a total of 7 modules). We tested the system with a group of experts using three criteria: completeness of the plan, coherence (activities versus child’s profile), and applicability (relation between activities and each module). Currently, the system can suggest plans for children with different disabilities such as Infantile Cerebral Palsy (ICP), autism, hypogenesis of the corpus callosum, intellectual disability, epilepsy, and hydranencephaly.

Each year, trauma accidents generate about five million deaths worldwide. Additionally, these accidents increase the number of people with disabilities in their most productive years. This is a problem that represents social and economic impacts on families. Most of these accidents occur due to a lack of information about prevention. Low-income and middle-income countries are especially affected because here there are no programs to provide information about trauma accident prevention. This document details the development of a robotic assistant to support the process of teaching about accident prevention in different scenarios: prevention of transit accidents (to be hit by a car) as well as prevention of home accidents (burns and intoxications). This assistant is equipped with an audiovisual user-friendly interface for the child and teacher to be used at initial schools. It is focused to teach children from ages three-six years old. The experiment’s results show that the information provided by the robotic assistant during the teaching process is retained by the children over a long time. This methodology provides a more interactive teaching process compared to traditional methods. The design, developing, implementation, experiments, results, and conclusions are detailed below.

The objective of this study is to implement a new therapy model, to improve the fine motor skills of children with intellectual disabilities. Using this proposed method, this study sought to discover whether two children with physical and intellectual disabilities can effectively improve their fine motor skills through the use of an arcade controller, specially designed to stimulate the movement of the fingers, hands, and arms of children, exercising them and improving their hand-eye coordination, finger control, digital grip, and body coordination. At the end, we present the results obtained by measuring the fine motor skills performed at the beginning and at the end of the study, applying the TEPSI's Coordination subtest which let us measure the fine motor skills of the kid, and a comparison of the improvement in fine motor skills with the results obtained with the TEPSI test applied to a child without any disability.

The review of state of the art on creating and managing learning resources and accessible Open Educational Resources (OER) and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) is a topic that cannot only consider formal literature. The evidence and lack of a measurement consensus require the inclusion of contextual information, corroborating scientific results with practical experiences. For this reason, this article presents a review of accessibility models, OER and MOOC, considering the gray literature to capture experiences and trying to establish a shared understanding of the terminology commonly used in research on virtual accessibility and its impact on higher education. The bibliographic review relies on analyzing articles and scientific publications related to the topic following the Multivocal Literature Review (MLR) format. The results of this review establish that it is possible to apply accessibility review methodologies with transversal actions in the creation and management of learning resources and MOOCs. The research is related to one of the seventeen sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. This research work has been co-funded by the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union, project EduTech (609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Nowadays the communication disorders affect million people worldwide. This situation is a reality even in developed countries such as the United States of America (40 million persons in general), the United Kingdom (1 million children), Australia (1.1 million), among many others. However, in several South American countries, such as Ecuador, there are not even comparative statistics regarding the number of children that present communication disorders. But each year hundreds of children join schools with different difficulties, of which the most common is the Dyslalia. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a new approach to engage children to participate in therapies with the support of a robotic assistant. This proposal was put to the test with ten children divided into two groups (control and pilot) during two months of therapy. The achieved results are encouraging.

The major cause of problems with hand motility in adults is due to work accidents, strokes, injuries and work accidents. The emergence of robotic gloves for hand rehabilitation therapy has been developed to assist with rehabilitation treatment. In this scientific paper, a robotic glove prosthesis is designed and developed for use in hand rehabilitation in patients with grip pathologies. There is talk of mechanical design and operation, and the glove is controlled by a mobile application that allows the physiotherapist to enter the settings for the patient or allow an expert system based on 15 rules to do so. The system is capable of generating reports for the patient, the physiotherapist or the caregiver to review. The developed system is portable, lightweight and easy to transport. The validation of the prototype was carried out with adult patients suffering from hemiparesis.

In a world where approximately 15% of the population lives with some form of disability one of the most vulnerable groups is constituted by children that present multiple disabilities. For example, in these cases, a child can have cerebral palsy and hearing loss concomitantly. Working with children with multiple disabilities constitutes a challenge, given that they present affectation in several development areas. For these reasons, we have developed a system to support the educational and therapeutic intervention for children with multiple disabilities. Our system relies on an electronic device and an ontology that models some of the most relevant entities and relations of therapy sessions. This proposal has been validated in two stages: (i) a preliminary validation (aesthetic and functionality) with 37 volunteers (higher education students), and (ii) a validation on a real scenario with 6 children with multiple disabilities during a period of two months. The results show high levels of motivation when children work with the device and positive comments by therapists and educators side.

The language and communication are considered mainstays of cognitive, psychological and emotional development of children. Commonly, during the first four years of life, children make significant progress in learning the language. However, in some cases, there arise delays or differences in patterns of language acquisition, aspects that constitute warnings of developmental problems. For these reasons, in this paper, we describe an educational platform (Pike-Aprende) aimed at supporting the following aspects: a) planning, monitoring, and intervention activities in children (carried out by teachers and Speech and Language Therapists, SLTs), b) automatic design of therapy/stimulation plans for children, and c) supporting the analysis/discrimination of utterances produced by children during sessions. To this aim, we developed a set of tools for web and mobile devices, an expert system for recommending exercises and activities (based on the patient’s profile). With the aim of determining the real feasibility of our proposal, we validated the platform with the support of experts in the initial education program. The experts used the system while developed therapy and stimulation sessions with children. The results show significant progress in several participants (in comparison to traditional therapy).

For several years the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has been questioned as a reason to diminish the social interaction between people. Although, it is not possible to remove ICT from our lives as we depend on them in many aspects, we can adapt them so that their use allows us to improve our social skills. This is the case of the Human-Computer Interface (HCI) and, especially those that involve emotions in a communication with machines similar to human interaction between peers. In this article, the implementation of an HCI based on an intelligent virtual agent is presented, with the possibility of learning basic information about the interlocutor and maintaining a short interaction on topics of general interest. The implementation was made in open-source software, generating not only a tool, but a development platform for other people to make contributions. The virtual agent was evaluated through short sessions with university students, who, according to a survey conducted, showed their acceptance of the interaction process.

Nowadays, the mobile devices (smartphones and tablets) are developed with important improvements in processing and memory capacity as well as camera resolution, massive storage or wireless connectivity. On those grounds, in developing countries these devices constitute an important alternative to develop assistive technologies to provide support in several areas as education, health care, and the elderly. Given that, in this paper we propose a new approach to handle the gesture recognition in robotic assistants that use a mobile device as main processor. Our approach uses a robust descriptor based on polygonal approximation, convex hull techniques and HU moments, and has achieved 93% precision in real scenarios with different light conditions.

Learning to write is a demanding endeavour that requires a combination of linguistic, motor and cognitive skills. Some children suffer from delay or inability to acquire those skills, which often hampers their performance at school and brings about serious consequences for self-esteem, personal expectations and social relationships. The situation worsens in developing countries, due to the lack of resources and specialised personnel. With this background, this paper describes an experiment with a newly-developed sensorised pencil with triangular prism shape, which is shown to yield substantial improvements in children with/without special education needs. A team of experts in the areas of speech therapy, occupational therapy, educational psychology, physiotherapy and pedagogy have expressed very positive opinions about the sensorised pencil and the accompanying software for the acquisition and analysis of quantitative data about handwriting. Furthermore, the device stands out for its low cost in comparison with similar developments, which is a key factor to aid children from low-income families. This fact is explained with a success story of manufacturing and delivering sensorised pencils in the Ecuadorian province of Azuay, framed in a multi-layer sustainable development perspective based on collaboration of several institutions and individuals. European Regional Development Fund | Ref. TIN2017-87604-R European programme to support education, training, youth and sport in Europe (ERASMUS+) | Ref. 609785-EPP-1-2019-1-ES-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP.

According to latest estimates of the World Health Organization (WHO), now a days there are 285 million people visually impaired world wide: 39 million are blind, 246 have low vision, and 19 million are children. This situation becomes more complex in developing countries because the local governments and families do not have enough resources and assistive technologies to improve the literacy programs of blind people. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an integral low-cost tool to support the learning process of Braille code at schools or homes. The novelty of our proposal is that it relies on a multi-layer architecture that provides the following functionalities: support to carry out reading and writing exercises using a single device, an interactive interface for designing and monitoring classroom activities through an approach based on data mining and rule-based reasoning, and a mobile application to interact with the system easily. Our proposal has been evaluated in a pilot experiment by 20 persons: 7 (blind) teachers that work with visual impaired/blind children, and 13 persons with normal vision. The results achieved during the evaluation of our proposal are encouraging: 90% of participants agree with the usefulness of the system as well as the high potential of including the tool in classrooms.

Currently, the deaf women’s community must face the lack of several resources related to their personal and professional development: (i) the lack of bilingualism (sign language and written language), (ii) the lack of appropriate knowledge about the local language sign; and (iii) the scarcity of educational plans on Sexual and Reproductive Health (SRH). This situation triggers several problems, such as the transmission of sexually trans- mitted diseases, unwanted pregnancy in adolescence, sexual violence and complications during pregnancy. For these reasons, in this document, we present an intelligent ecosystem and an educational methodology aimed at improving access to SRH programs in Ecuadorian Sign Language (ESL), with the aim of improving access to information and knowledge in SRH through methodologies based on interactive and dynamic learning environments capable of responding to the specific needs of deaf people. Our proposal relies on an expert system based on rules-reasoning, and an educational web-environment. This approach was tested with 30 volunteers (26 deaf women and 4 interpreters in ESL), evaluating the contents that are housed within the system (content quality, the coherence of the applied methodology, access to the environment,...). The results are encouraging and have shown that it is necessary to implement interactive programs for the support of the SRH.

In a globalized world like the one we live in nowadays, it is fundamental for every nation to preserve the cultural heritage. In this line, the UNESCO estimates that, if nothing is done, half of 6000 plus languages spoken today will disappear by the end of this century. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an expert system that has the aim of helping children during their visits to the museum. Our proposal relies on rule-based reasoning and focuses on helping which exhibits can be visited according to children’s preference without leaving aside the possibility of introducing new contents (exhibition rooms) to trigger the visitors’ preference on new cultural topics. The system was evaluated by a team of experts according to the following criteria: effectiveness, concordance, and novelty.

Nowadays the governments of several nations must address the challenge of providing a high-quality education for all persons from the perspective of an inclusive focus. In this line, in the e-learning area exist several standards and models aimed at establishing quality guidelines or structures to certify an optimal process of development, implementation, and evaluation of Learning Objects (LO). Given that the teaching-learning process goes beyond the use of technological tools, it is necessary understanding that must exist a synergy between the technology and the methodological design used to establish an innovative and high-quality model. However, LOs have been developed to respond only to the needs and requirements presented by "standard students." For this reason, these objects have lost the universality of their purpose as well as the functionality of responding to the diverse learning needs. For these reasons, in this paper, we present a novel approach that uses ontologies and knowledge modeling to support the accessibility analysis and evaluation of learning objects. Our model extends existing ontologies such as WCAG 2.0, Schema DRD and SKOS to represent how accessibility metadata relates to the most common types of disabilities (intellectual, physical, visual, auditory, etc.). We have validated our proposal with the support of a multidisciplinary team of experts, and the achieved results are encouraging.

The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that early therapeutic intervention in children with disabilities in- creases the opportunities for their development as well as the possibility of having a better quality of life in the future. In this line, it is common that the therapists work with children in the rehabilitation/development of motor skills, given that they are strongly related with the cognitive development. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an interactive system aimed at supporting the design of therapy plans for physical rehabilitation and development of motor skills in children with different types of disabilities. Our approach relies on three pillars: a set of serious games (to motivate children working in therapy sessions), a fuzzy logic module (to automatically configure the game-parameters accordingly patient profile), and a Kinect interface to detect movements performed by children. To validate our proposal, we carried out an experiment consisting of two stages: one with five children in real therapy sessions and a laboratory test to determine the efficiency of the fuzzy logic module.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), due of the rapidity of cultural change, safeguarding the world's tangible and intangible cultural heritage has become an increasingly complex and multidimensional undertaking. Therefore, it is fundamental for the children and youth of today to learn the culture, values, and traditions that define their identity as well as the identity of their nation. For these reasons in this paper, we present an interactive app aimed at supporting both teaching and rescuing the heritage of Canari and Inca indigenous cultures. Our mobile app can be used at children's home or during the guided visits of one of the most important museums in Ecuador: the Pumapungo Museum. Likewise, the app can identify QR codes to show multimedia material to children, contains several 3D objects that are presented using Augmented Reality (AR), and incorporates a Natural Language Processing (NLP) module to determine the children's learning progress. In this line, it is important mentioning that children use the app to create small "stories" about the learned concepts. The app was tested in real guided visits in the museum with 30 children from three different schools (low and middle -income), and the results show high levels of interest in the contents and the app.

Computer games have made it possible to improve rehabilitation therapies and serious games, allowing interaction in a friendly environment that adapts to new technologies. Several devices have been used in rehabilitation therapies as an alternative to traditional therapies that are not very interesting for children. The use of these devices that integrate sensors, infrared cameras, accelerometers, allow children to interact in a virtual environment with greater possibilities for learning and creativity. Therefore, a system capable of improving fine motor skills in children is proposed, through a serious game, which will work with a Leap Motion device and a 3D environment. The proposed system will allow the therapist to choose between different levels of serious games according to what the child needs.

According to the guidelines provided in the UNESCO program “Learning for All,” the stakeholders (governments, institutions, teachers, instructional designers and quality assurance/qualification recognition bodies) are responsible on the development of contribution to guarantee the quality access learning for persons with disabilities or special needs. For this reason, in this paper, we present a proposal for an ontological network to model the knowledge of accessibility guidelines related to Learning Objects (LO). Our approach relies on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0), the Schema accessibility metadata, and a novel proposal to include the preference according to disability characteristics.

According to the Department of Health & Human Services of the USA nearly 7.7% of children age 3 and 17 has had a disorder related to voice, speech, language or swallowing in the past 12 months. This reality is not different from Ecuador where “Consejo Nacional para la Igualdad de Discapacidades” indicated that a 1.34% of children present language and speech disorders and these occur more in boys than in girls. Based on this, it's important that speech therapy provides treatment for children with difficulties in speech and language and these are developed according to a set of areas, sub-areas, activities, etc. previously defined by experts in area the speech therapy. Consequently, it seeks to generate a set of multimedia resources (images, sounds and videos) for the learning / teaching of language and speech. This repository will have an inference engine based on the knowledge modeled in the ontologies where according to the profile of the child allows to generate the best activities and based on these the necessary resources of multimedia files available on the internet to improve the language and speech of the child's.