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There are several factors involved in functional rehabilitation, some of which are crucial for the effectiveness of the treatment performed, such as the patient's engagement in the activity and the physical therapist's active participation. Difficulties in accessing the therapy, because of many reasons, have given rise to initiatives of telerehabilitation, that is, holding sessions via telecommunication technologies. In this scenario, the therapist's active participation is compromised and, on the other hand, the exercises performed are often repetitive and boring, decreasing the patient's engagement and motivation, and that impacts on the sessions' results. Considering these issues, the present work aims to validate the hypothesis that an exergame (a serious game developed with the objective of motivating the performance of physical exercises) built from a distributed architecture is effective in carrying out telerehabilitation sessions that involve a cycle ergometer as a device - a bedside bicycle used in rehabilitation sessions for patients with motor disorders (affected by Cerebral Vascular Disorders, Cystic Fibrosis or who were hospitalized with COVID-19, for example). In order to validate this hypothesis, the construction of a prototype of the exergame was undertaken, followed by two validation steps done by 16 physical therapists from Hospital das Clínicas of UFG (based on the Delphi Method) and an experiment involving 12 volunteers (Player Experience assessment). About 88,8% of the specialists, after the two rounds of evaluation, considered that the exergame is appropriate for telerehabilitation sessions. Furthermore, 75% of the volunteers rated the experience as “very satisfying”, while the remaining 25% characterized it as “satisfactory”. Therefore, the results allowed to conclude the effectiveness and satisfiability of the game, proving the validity of the research hypothesis.

According to Mark Weiser, ubiquitous computing focuses on seamlessly integrating computing tasks into people’s daily lives. Because of current technology limitations, the realization of ubiquitous computing observes a limited set of aspects of ubiquitous computing, such as, mobility and context, which are based on services that integrate the users with the resources that are present on a delimited ubiquitous environment (such as in smart spaces). Instead, we explored a different approach, in which services are used not to integrate an individual user with the environment, but to integrate the users present in the environment with one another. One way to realize this aspect is by using content sharing, first-class application dat, that serve as integration medium between users. However, due to the environment complexity and lack of middleware platforms, applications that follow this approach are repeatedly built from scratch using raw techniques. Aiming to provide an infrastructure for the development of this kind of applications, we propose Content Sharing for Smart Spaces (C3S), a middleware that offers a high-level programming model using primitives that are based on a set of content sharing semantics and ubiquitous application concepts. The primitives express a small set of behaviors, such as move, clone, and mirror, which serve as building blocks for developers to implement sharing and content ubiquity features, while the ubiquitous concepts supported by the middleware allow the manipulation of users, groups and ubiquitous applications. We validated our proposal using two different case studies that allowed us to explore these features. Our results show that our middleware provides an easier way to develop sharing-based applications compared to related work found in the literature.