As technological devices surrounding the television are changing, so are viewers’ habits. When the interactive Television industry turns its focus to the development of second-screen applications, this paper reports on a study aiming to analyse the impact, on users, of notifications in second-screen scenarios. As part of the study, the research team developed a prototype that simulated an application able to deliver synchronized information related with TV content, notifying the user – through visual, audio and haptic stimuli - whenever new content was displayed in the tablet. The study included observation sessions, conducted in laboratory settings, with participants (N=12) being invited to watch a 15-minute film while using the application. Tests were conducted under a cognitive walk-through methodology, and data collected through direct observation and questionnaires. Results show that to achieve a balanced user experience in second-screen scenarios notifications on tablet should be combined with visual notifications on TV

The actual trends in the TV ecosystem present considerable social, organisational and technological challenges in the value-chain of Pay-TV operators. Among these is the global increase in bandwidth, the shifting of the storage capacity in the cloud, and the affordability of traditional content providers when facing the competitiveness of OTT content. In this framework, Pay-TV operators are presenting their customers with a huge offer of contents available from linear-TV, Catch-up TV and VoD services. However, this overloaded TV ecosystem is likely to lead viewers to get lost and face difficulties when deciding what to watch on TV. To overcome these difficulties and be competitive, operators need to provide innovative and trustable solutions, alternative to traditional EPGs, enabling users to discover the right content for a specific context.To target this problem, a second screen application (GUIDER) was developed to offer an original user interface, based on a multidimensional spatial representation of TV contents for those mindless zapping situations where viewers do not know, in advance, what they are in the mood to watch.This paper reports on the evaluation of the GUIDER App, aiming to determine the level of interest in the several features implemented and in the filtering criteria available; identify usability issues; and predicting the future uses of the App in domestic scenarios. The evaluation was made in Portugal and Brazil with a convenience sample of 20 participants in each country. Despite the differences in the TV ecosystems, both countries appear to be promising markets for this new kind of second screen applications, with Brazilians showing a higher perception of the added value of GUIDER

The number of technical solutions to remotely monitoring elderly citizens and detecting hazard situations has been increasing in the last few years. These solutions have dual purposes: to provide a feeling of safety to the elderly and to inform their relatives about potential risky situations, such as falls, forgotten medication, and other unexpected deviations from daily routine. Most of these solutions are based on IoT (Internet of Things) and dedicated sensors that need to be installed at the elderly’s houses, hampering mass adoption. This justifies the search for non-invasive technical alternatives with smooth integration that relying only on existent devices, without the need for any additional installations. Therefore, this paper presents the SecurHome TV ecosystem, a technical solution based on the elderly’s interactions with their TV sets—one of the most used devices in their daily lives—acting as a non-invasive sensor enabling one to detect potential hazardous situations through an elaborated warning algorithm. Thus, this paper describes in detail the SecurHome TV ecosystem, with special emphasis on the warning algorithm, and reports on its validation process. We conclude that notwithstanding some constraints while setting the user’s pattern, either upon the cold start of the application or after an innocuous change in the user’s TV routine, the algorithm detects most hazardous situations contributing to monitor elderly well-being at home.

In spite of the wide dissemination of technologies and digital resources, people with special needs still find barriers and difficulties in accessing and using many of the information technology (IT) services currently available. This problem is particularly critical in usage scenarios involving mass media devices like Television (TV), specially taking in consideration its interactive format with all advanced features it brings. In this context, the creation of inclusion strategies becomes essential for increasing digital literacy and citizens’ capacity to participate in different areas using advanced services like Interactive Television (iTV). Universal Design shows up as the appropriate approach to answer this problem, since the systems that are shaped based on this methodology make available the accommodation of a wide range of human skills, abilities, needs and preferences.In this framework, this paper introduces a research related to universal design issues on the iTV scope, which aims the conceptualization, prototyping and validation of an IPTV service specifically designed to look on visually impaired users’ needs. The presented results are based on the second phase of this research, which intended the conceptualization and development of the prototype. Accordingly, we describe the elicitation process of the technical and functional requirements that led us to the implementation and test of the advanced and customizable features of an adapted IPTV service