Three intelligent information access systems were successfully used to evaluate the teacher's perceptions regarding the utility of these systems in learning activities. The results of this study showed that integration of reliable sources of information, bilingualism and selective annotation of concepts were the most valued features by the teachers, who also considered the incorporation of these systems into learning activities to be potentially very useful. In addition, in the context of our experimental conditions, our work provides useful insights into the way to appropriately integrate this type of intelligent information access systems into learning activities, revealing key themes to consider when developing such approaches.

Chronic patients could benefit from the technological advances, but the clinical approaches for this kind of patients are still limited. This paper describes a system for chronic patients monitoring both, in home and external environments. For this purpose, we used novel technologies as big data, cloud computing and internet of things (IoT). Additionally, the system has been validated for three use cases: cardiovascular disease (CVD), hypertension (HPN) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which were selected for their incidence in the population. This system is innovative within e-health, mainly due to the use of a big data architecture based on open-source components, also it provides a scalable and distributed environment for storage and processing of biomedical sensor data. The proposed system enables the incorporation of non-medical data sources in order to improve the self-management of chronic diseases and to develop better strategies for health interventions for chronic and dependents patients.

Communication and planning are skills expected among graduates. However, a skills deficit continues to be present among students. To address this problem, here we considered the final year project (FYP), a widely used way of working on skills in STEM degrees. Furthermore, we took into account recent research that highlights the importance of students' thoughts, beliefs, and emotions, in addition to characteristics such as self-efficacy or self-management within the learning process. Here a framework was designed around a semi-guided learning approach, with the aim of improving STEM students' skills and providing them with a work context that facilitates favorable behaviors and feelings associated with writing their FYP report. This framework, implemented in a Spanish university in Madrid, was designed to accomplish their work during restricted face-to-face work due to COVID-19. Through mixed-focus surveys, the perceptions of 55 students (male/female ratio = 4) were collected in relation to what the framework had provided them. The results showed that most of the students perceived improvement both in planning and written communication skills. The qualitative analysis also allowed us to determine the most common difficulties found among students, as well as benefits provided by the framework, among which they highlighted, greater efficiency in the writing process and help to ensure the quality of the FYP report. Our findings allow promoting beneficial results for STEM student and support the idea of considering the cognitive-emotional context of the student as a part of the environment in which to develop facilitating tools for learning and skills development.

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