Development of a multimodal reminder system for older persons in their residential home

Abstract

To live a self-determined life at home is uncontroversally a desire of many ageing people. Decreases in motor and mental capabilities, however, frequently make daily activities more difficult for them. Older people often forget tasks and appointments, and decreased mobility can limit their social interaction. In this study, we investigate the way in which technological support can assist in the organisation, structuring and remembering of daily activities. Aiming at assistance seamlessly integrated into a person's household, we carried out an initial user study to investigate the technology and the kind of desired assistance of such a personal household assistant system should offer. We designed a reminder system for appointments and activities that uses different sounds, light colours or vibration patterns to represent different categories of calendar events such as upcoming tasks and appointments. The evaluation results show a preference for solely acoustic presentations or an acoustic presentation in combination with visual and tactile output. In our future work, we will refine the ambient and interactive presentation and implement and evaluate this technology in residential homes.

Keywords:

• Ageing society
• multimodal user interfaces
• ambient-assisted living

Acknowledgements

The Lower Saxony research network ‘Design of Environments for Ageing’ acknowledges the support of the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture through the ‘Niedersächsisches Vorab’ grant programme.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.