Digital Family Portrait Field Trial

Abstract

A growing social problem in the U.S., and elsewhere, is enabling older adults to continue living independently, as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. One key part of this complex problem is providing awareness of senior adults' day-to-day activities, promoting "peace of mind" for extended family members. The Digital Family Portrait (DFP) is one approach to providing peace of mind that has shown promise. To date, research on the DFP has been limited to wizard-of-oz based experiments over short periods of time. This paper describes a DFP field trial in which a private home was instrumented with sensors rather than relying on input from wizard-of-oz technology. This field trial was conducted over a period of one year between an aging parent living alone in her own home and her adult child living 50 miles distant.From this field trial we find that even though there was no critical reason for the adult child to be concerned about his mother, all involved parties found utility in the presence of the DFP, even those family members who were not directly involved in the field trial itself.

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.…”

Mobile Interfaces for Better Living: Supporting Awareness in a Smart Home Environment

“…The interfaces should share certain application information with surrounding people running the same application, such as the varying desires for different in-home temperatures or lighting levels-which would impact when and for how long windows would be opened, closed, or shaded. These interaction methods are similar to the ones highlighted earlier for existing smart, green homes (e.g., [3], [4]). …”

“…Often computing technology plays a key role in monitoring the information generated by these homes and in controlling certain aspects of the home. For example, the Georgia Tech Aware Home includes motion sensors that monitor the activities of elderly home dwellers and conveys an overview of the activity level to a remote caretaker [3], and under-development interfaces envision in-home sensors like smart scales and glucometers sharing health related data [4].…”

Digital Keepsake Box: Sharing Items and Memories to Enhance Communications among Remote Persons

“…Digital Family Portrait [1] is a photo-frame interface, which indicates the daily activities of a family member living in a remote place. FamilyPlanter [2] sends information regarding the presence and motion of someone to a family member.…”