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.

Abstract. In this paper, we describe the iterative design and evaluation of a storytelling application for individuals with expressive aphasia. Our user studies show that besides basic requirements for medical care and training, there is an unmet need of aphasics to share their daily experiences and activities, anecdotes and feelings with their significant others. Thus, the goal of the proposed design is to enhance aphasics' quality of life by providing a platform for them to create and share their stories. More specifically, the goal is to enable them to play a more active role in social exchanges by providing them with a multimodal interface for storytelling that has the following functionalities: taking photos, making drawings and annotations, and recording sounds. In the end of this paper, we also summarize important design guidelines that surfaced during the course of this project and that are potentially relevant for other designers and researchers working with aphasics.

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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.

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