Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which since 2013 is considered as an umbrella term for several disorders such as autistic syndrome, Asperger’s disorder and pervasive developmental disorder, is characterized, among other aspects, by deficits in social-emotion reciprocity. This deficit manifests itself as a reduced sharing of emotions and an increased difficulty in interpreting emotions other people are feeling, which in the end leads to more impairments in social communication. Since it is possible to help a person with ASD (especially children) to improve their ability to understand and detect emotions, we have developed a proposal which integrates emotion recognition technologies, often used in the field of HCI, to try to overcome this difficulty. In this paper, we present a novel software application developed as a serious game to teach children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to identify and express emotions. The system incorporates cutting-edge technology to support novel interaction mechanisms based on tangible user interfaces (TUIs) and emotion recognition from facial expressions. In this way, children interact with the system in a natural way by simply grasping objects with their hands and using their faces. The system has been assessed on the premises of an association with children with ASD. The outcomes of the evaluation are very positive and support the validity of the proposal.

Emerging mobile technologies are being applied successfully in cultural spaces to help users to get the correct information no matter where he is, in such a way that their use result better than traditional guides. Different technologies (RFID, Wi-Fi, etc.) are applied to allow mobile devices, such as PDAs or smart phones, interact with their environment in order to provide users with updated information regarding his physical location. This paper describes a system environment based on both active and passive RFID technology which supports the automatic positioning of mobile devices in closed spaces. This proposal results especially useful to provide location-aware information avoiding the need for users to manually select the desired information they want to view. This proposal has been successfully proved for the location and positioning of PDAs.

GPS seems to be the best solution to develop outdoor location systems, but performance of these systems is not good enough to locate entities within indoor environments, mainly if accuracy and precision are required. In this article we propose a tracking indoor system based on passive RFID technology that is able to accurately locate autonomous entities, such as robots, people, etc, within a defined surface. In order to validate the proposal, we compared our system technology performance against other alternatives built on different technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IrDA, ultrasound, etc). We also include the system evaluation and final remarks with future improvements.

Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is a research field where the role played by individuals as members of groups is fundamental. The human being is not considered as an individual entity, but it is considered as a being embedded into the society, where he works and interacts. From the beginning, many CSCW systems have arisen. Some taxonomies appeared in order to find a way to classify all these tools, but they have become more and more complicated, therefore nowadays such classifications cannot sort them correctly. In this paper we present a taxonomy according to these changes, so that CSCW systems can be classified in a more flexible way.