Água e aplicativos para dispositivos móveis

Abstract

The current situation of water resources indicates that several factors hinder the achievement of water sustainability, leading the planet to a possible water crisis. The search for solutions requires a global view of the causes and consequences, so, technological innovations are adopted. Notable among such is the Information Systems that let you collect, process, store, transmit and display information about a particular topic. At the same time, there is the spread of mobile devices and applications, an innovative field considering man's interaction potential with the environment. Given this background, the objective of this study was to identify and to evaluate the applications for mobile devices, with themes related to water, contained in scientific databases and online store selected. For this, was conducted a Systematic Review of the Literature in eight digital library, identifying 3107 studies, which, after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, were selected and analysed 34 articles. In addition, was conducted a Web Survey on Google Play Store by searching for 132 terms related to water resources, selected based on the Thesaurus of Water Resources of the Brazilian National Water Agency. The 4913 applications were found of which 2282 were considered relevant. At the end of the analysis, a third methodology was employed. Triangulation of data verified the convergence between the results of two previous surveys. Considering the results of the RSL, the main purpose of the articles were the development of an application for smartphones that run on the Android system. Applications were classified based on their use, highlighting technical character, that with respect to RSL, were generally directed to water quality. Research on the virtual store returned predominantly applications: in English; categorized by Google Play as Customization; with download interval between 100 and 500; and classified more than 4.0 stars by users. Considering the proposed apps classification, the technical nature correspond to 269 applications, which were subcategorized emphasizing the Calculators class. The confluence of the data from both surveys by triangulation provided eight applications reported by the RSL and web survey prevailing Education category proposed by Google Play. The results indicate that, although relevant, the connection between water resources and mobile applications is still little explored in RSL and mobile applications, a fact that underlines the importance of this study, by placing it at the forefront, as an initiative at national and international levels.