People who have dementia (PwD) experience deteriorating executive functions, in particular their working memory, and therefore find it hard to complete multistep tasks or activities of daily living. There is no doubt that during the pandemic, PwD and their caregivers were particularly vulnerable, often isolated which affected their mental and physical health. Their ability to live independently was hampered, fomenting depression in the PwD and burnout on informal caregivers. Information technology can support dementia care improving the quality of life of PwD and easing the burden on caregivers. There is an increasing demand to support informal caregivers and improve their well-being by making dementia challenges less severe. This study uses qualitative techniques to design a model with technological strategies based on semi-structured interviews applied to seven informal caregivers from two different countries. Based on these interviews we developed design insights for implementing solutions to help informal caregivers take care of their PwD at home using conversational agents. We hope that the findings presented in this study will help researchers, and developers design solutions that can support PwD and informal caregivers.

Scrum is one of many agile frameworks and is considered the most popular and widely adopted. Although Scrum presents several advantages, process and final product quality continue to be Scrum’s main challenges. The quality assessment should be an essential activity in the software development process. Several authors have attempted to improve the quality of Scrum projects, changing some aspects of the framework, such as including new quality practices, a quality role, and quality processes. However, the quantification of quality is still a challenge. For that reason, the authors proposed a framework called Scrumlity, which was defined in a previous study. This framework proposes a change to Scrum, including a quality role and some artifacts to evaluate quality through a complete execution of a Sprint. In this study, the authors add a User Story Quality assessment to the framework. The User Story Quality Assessment includes over 250 analyzed User Stories. Results obtained after this experiment indicate the importance of executing a User Story Quality Assessment and that Scrum Team members are willing to accept adding this to the framework.

In recent days, we live the mobile health revolution as medical apps are flourishing in the marketplace for all the different mobile devices. Diabetes apps are the most prevalent chronic disease-specific apps available commercially for Android or iOS. This study presents a selection through a holistic evaluation of some mobile apps for preventing or managing diabetes. After the selection, the study presents an evaluation from two perspectives: 1) mapping the implemented persuasion strategies in the mobile apps and 2) a usability evaluation with real users. This paper presents an evaluation of six mobile apps (Diabetes Prevent, my Sugar, Intellin Diabetes, Social Diabetes, Glucose Buddy, and One-Touch Reveal) for diabetes management or prevention. The results reveal that most of the apps are focus on controlling the disease. They had an accepted SUS score. However, they are not implementing the persuasion strategies as it should be done for medical systems. These findings suggested that it is essential to develop mobile applications based on international regulations towards covering aspects such as diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, treatment, and alleviation of disease. Furthermore, the applications should include persuasion strategies and integrating usability guidelines to change user’s attitudes and behaviors and improve user satisfaction in mobile apps.