Pavan Dadlani

Aurama: caregiver awareness for living independently with an augmented picture frame display

Aurama is a system designed to provide peace of mind and a sense of connectedness to adults who care for elderly parents living alone. Aurama monitors the elders at home using unobtrusive sensor technology and collects data about sleeping patterns, weight trends, cognitive abilities and presence at home. The system provides an unobtrusive ambient information display that presents the status of the elder and lets its users inspect long-term data about the well-being of the elder interactively. Aurama was designed iteratively with substantial user involvement through interviews, prototype evaluation, focus groups and lab tests. The final prototype was evaluated in two field trials each involving an elder and their adult children. The input of users throughout the design process and during these tests demonstrates clearly the potential of awareness systems to support the target user group to obtain peace of mind and feel connected. Furthermore, the users indicate a clear need for information on long-term trends relating to the well-being of aging parents, in contrast to the current emphasis in this field of research on providing instantaneous status information about daily activities and context.

Let's stay in touch: sharing photos for restoring social connectedness between rehabilitants, friends and family

A case study on the use of an existing photo sharing application in a spinal cord lesion rehabilitation centre is presented. The study focuses on enhancing social connectedness through sharing photos between rehabilitants and their families and friends. Four rehabilitants participated in this study for 6-7 weeks. Most photos sent related to sharing things in everyday life and keeping the rehabilitant informed about regular events. The combination of interviews and content analysis reveals that only a minority of the photos lead to follow-up communication about the contents of the photos. Rehabilitants were positively surprised how spontaneous photo sharing simplified the way they could reconnect to their friends and family, without the immediate need or obligation to engage in a (phone) conversation.

Supporting peace of mind and independent living with the Aurama awareness system

An awareness system was designed to provide peace of mind and a sense of connectedness to adults who care for an elderly parent living alone. The iterative design of the Aurama awareness system showed and our empirical research, including field trials ranging from four to six months, confirm the potential of awareness systems to support both generations suggesting that research should examine, firstly, how to convey long-term trends regarding the wellbeing of the elderly and, secondly, how to intertwine the communication of awareness information with expressive forms of communication. We further explore the role that formal care providers can play when caring for the elderly using the awareness system. We discuss implications of our studies for the design of ambient intelligent systems supporting awareness between elderly, their adult children and care providers, and derive several lessons learned in conducting long-term field trials.

iParrot: towards designing a persuasive agent for energy conservation

Computational agents can motivate people to change their behaviour towards energy use in a home setting. In this paper, we investigate the desig and evaluation of the iParrot, an intelligent agent that helps to persuade family members to conserve energy in their home. The iParrot was designed as a concept in the form of a video prototype with two conditions. The results from the evaluation show that people will comply with the advice from such an agent for energy conservation if the agent is friendlier. Moreover, participants were able to distinctly perceive the friendliness level for both conditions.

Designing and evaluating affective aspects of sociable media to support social connectedness

The use of sociable media for supporting social connectedness has been a serious subject of study for researchers and designers in recent years. Social connectedness is considered to be the momentary experience of belongingness and relatedness with others. Particular user groups may benefit from support in social connectedness, such as elderly or divorced parents and their children. Several research projects have made efforts to support social connectedness. However, there have been few formal studies into the factors affecting connectedness. Also, the way in which social connectedness has been measured in studies to date is diverse and often not grounded in psychological theory. This shows a need for more elaborate investigation in how social connectedness can be measured, what types of content could be shared between users, and which interactions should be provided by a system, when aiming for social connectedness. This should lead to guidelines and an ontology of elements to help and inspire designers of social connectedness systems.

Intertwining Implicit and Explicit Awareness of Wellbeing to Support Peace of Mind and Connectedness

An awareness system was designed to provide peace of mind and a sense of connectedness to adults who care for an elderly parent living alone. Our empirical research, including a field trial of six months, confirms the potential of awareness systems to support both generations suggesting that future research should examine, firstly, how to convey long-term trends regarding the wellbeing of the elderly and, secondly, how to intertwine the communication of awareness information with expressive forms of communication. We discuss implications of our studies for the design of ambient intelligent systems supporting awareness between elderly and their adult children.

Ambient telephony: Designing a communication system for enhancing social presence in home mediated communication

The experience of telephonic communication in the home environment has remained very similar for decades: practical, but intrusive, and providing little experience of social presence. This paper presents the work aiming at improving the experience of social presence experience in telephony. We present the results of several user studies on telephone usage and based on these, propose the use of distributed speakerphone systems (or ambient telephones). We report empirical research comparing two different ambient telephone systems. The first system is an ambient system where the arrays of loudspeakers and microphones are embedded in the ceiling and the home audio system around the home. In the second experiment, we replaced the embedded system by a distributed set of clearly visible and tangible speakerphone units. We report lessons learned and implications for the design of ambient telephone systems.

SoPresent: An Awareness System for Connecting Remote Households

Families and friends are often separated by distance making it difficult for them to stay in touch with each other. A prolific number of popular communication technologies and social are testimony how important informal and social communication with friends and family can be, and how this can drive industrial and business developments.

Mogic: Expressing affective messages between empty nesters and their children

This paper describes the evaluation of a communication system called ‘Mogic’ that aims at stimulating social interaction. The system was designed for empty nesters and their children. A context mapping study revealed that there is a need to share emotions and feelings with each other. An overview of the related work on affective systems and the theoretical models behind them is provided. Several experiments were conducted to evaluate whether there is a consistency in colours and movements that people naturally choose for expressing different emotions. The experiment shows there are variations between participants, but that some elements are consistent. The results of the empirical study with the system suggest that participants find it more difficult to express emotions than to perceive emotions. The paper concludes with suggestions for possible improvements to the system and suggestions for further user studies.

Supporting the Diagnosis of Childhood Pneumonia in Low Resource Settings

Pneumonia is the leading infectious disease killer of children under 5 worldwide [1]. 99 % of deaths occur in developing countries in low-resource settings [2]. The World Health Organization (WHO) has implemented Community Case Management (CCM) in rural areas to help diagnose and treat the main diseases in children under 5. CCM empowers members of the community, known as Community Health Workers (CHWs), to identify danger signs of pneumonia, a.o. counting the number of breaths per minute and comparing the result with defined cut-off rates per age group.