Daily Activities Diarist: Supporting Aging in Place with Semantically Enriched Narratives

Abstract

Abstract. The Daily Activities Diarist is an awareness system that supports social connectedness between seniors living alone and their social intimates. The Daily Activities Diarist extracts automatically an Activity-of-Daily-Life (ADL)-journal from data collected through a wireless sensor network installed at the home of the seniors. We describe the design of the system, its implementation and the lessons from two trials lasting 2 weeks each. The paper makes the case for narrative presentation of awareness information and for seamful design of awareness systems of this ilk.

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

“…More specifically, we report on the use of ambient intelligence technology to let adult children be aware of the well-being of a remote elder. This general scenario has been shown to hold promise by earlier research such as the CareNet display (Consolvo et al 2004), the Digital Family Portrait (DFP) (Mynatt et al 2001;Rowan and Mynatt 2005) and the Diarist system (Metaxas et al 2007). These earlier research prototypes are discussed in the next paragraph.…”

“…The Diarist system (Metaxas et al 2007) follows a similar approach to the DFP but provides a semantically higher level of interpretation of the sensed activities. It detects the activities of daily life of the elder and informs their child remotely.…”

“…There are still open questions regarding the type of information that needs to be captured and communicated, regarding if and how users would utilize such technologies in realistic circumstances, and regarding concerns users may have about using them. Actual deployments are still very scarce and small scale: for the scenario of remote awareness of a lone elderly there are about 5 actual deployments reported to date (Consolvo et al 2004;Mynatt et al 2001;Rowan and Mynatt 2005;Metaxas et al 2007;Morris et al 2003) and each explored awareness of different aspects of the elder's life. Hence, the evidence regarding the benefits they provide is still only preliminary and requires elaboration and corroboration.…”

Amelie: A Recombinant Computing Framework for Ambient Awareness

“…In most cases the 'seams' by which technological components are aggregated do not interest users and should therefore be transparent; however, the complex nature of Ambient Intelligence environments and the uncertainty that is bound to be associated with sensing and networking infrastructures, mean that it is often important to allow users to inspect and understand the nature of these seams and even to exploit them in the design of such systems. Metaxas et al [10] argued how letting users inspect the basis of the inferences made from sensed data can let them better deal with erroneous information and can be essential for their use.…”

“…Example applications of such systems address well known scenarios such as awareness of a lone elderly relative living independently [10]. Existing implementations of awareness systems of this latter kind, which we call ambient awareness systems have so far been of very limited scale.…”