Multimodal Reminder Systems for the Elderly in their Residential Home

Living a self-determined live at home is without controversy a desire of many ageing people.  Dwindling abilities, however, may make daily activities more difficult. People might start to forget tasks and appointments but also reduced mobility may keep them from social interaction. Recent advances in the field of ambient assisted living show that installing smart-home technology in the residential homes of older people may contribute to this demand. Appropriate electronic assistant systems may help older people to stay longer and more self-determined in their familiar environment, reduce the amount of external help and thus certainly improve the well-being of the user. For the development of such aids several challenges arise: The context of use and the particular needs of the elderly in their household have to be determined and the interaction between human and electronic system has to be designed carefully as these are key factors for the acceptance of the system. However, most of today’s electronic assistant systems for the home do not yet address the needs and skills of elderly people and often do not sufficiently consider the seamless integration of the assistive system into the people’s residential spaces and everyday life. Unnatural and obtrusive user interfaces may create handling errors and frustration for elderly people, leading to low acceptance and not using the system.

One of the objectives of the Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing (GAL) is to develop an assistance system that helps older adults to structure their everyday life at home. The Personal Activity and Household Assistant (PAHA) is integrated into the household and reminds the resident of upcoming appointments, events and tasks. The main focus of the assistance functionality is assistance organization, structuring, and memorization of daily activities, rather than just “taking over” responsibilities for the individual. As a user group we aim at the so called "golden agers", who would use the system before an age-associated function loss is progressed and therefore offers a familiarization with the new support form of care. Consequently, the household assistant will encourage social participation as well as self-sufficiency and contributes to a longer and better independent life.

In this presentation, we investigate how technological support can assist in the organization, structuring, and memorization of daily activities. Aiming at providing 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 that a personal household assistant system should offer. We designed a reminder for appointments and activities that uses different sounds, light colours, and vibration patterns to represent different categories of calendar events, such as upcoming tasks and appointments. The evaluation results show a preference for acoustic presentations alone or in combination with visual and/or tactile output. In our future work we will refine the ambient and interactive presentation and implement and evaluate this technology in residential homes.

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