Designing Home Care Reminder Systems: Lessons Learned Through Co-Design with Older Users Marilyn McGee-Lennon, Aidan Smeaton, Stephen Brewster Glasgow Interactive Systems Group School of Computing Science University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK Email: mcgeemr@dcs.gla.ac.uk Abstract— Technology for care at home is an important factor in supporting our ageing population. These technologies need to be both accessible and acceptable to a wide variety of users if they are to be taken up and successfully used in people’s homes. This paper describes the user-centered co-design and evaluation of a multimodal reminder system for the home deployed on mobile devices. Six co-design sessions (N=25 users) were carried out with groups of older users to investigate the best methods and techniques for configuring reminders and how they should be delivered within the home. Both sketches and implemented prototypes were used to gather qualitative feedback on a variety of interaction features and techniques to find what worked best for an older user group. We present the findings from the sessions in terms of the re-design of a personalisable multimodal reminder system. We also present the co-design process used and go on to discuss the value this method adds to the design and evaluation of home care technologies for older users. Keywords- co-design; evaluation; older users; multimodal; reminder systems; configuration; personalisation. I. INTRODUCTION People with disabilities or chronic long-term conditions (LTCs) are increasingly being cared for at home [6]. Technology that can support or augment this care at home is often referred to as assisted or independent living technology (ALT) and is increasingly accepted as key in continuing to supporting our ageing population [18] and a general shift towards more self managed care. Assisted living technologies that include sensor based devices that alert the user or other stakeholder (friends, family or carers) to the state of the house or person (a tap is running, a person is in the bedroom) are often traditionally referred to as telecare. There are now a wider range of telecare and telehealth technologies that can also generally promote health and wellbeing, such as communication aids, remote rehabilitation and consultation systems, vital signs monitors and reminder systems to support daily living routines. Such technologies can enable people to live at home independently for longer, improve health and wellbeing, and support self care of long term conditions [4, 6]. Pervasive care technologies need to be accessible to a wide variety of users with a range of physical, cognitive and sensory impairments [1, 23]. They also need to be acceptable, usable to people with varying degrees of technical expertise and easily integrated into current living patterns if they are to be taken up and used in the homes of people managing their own care [4, 11]. Previous work has revealed many examples of existing home care technologies being prescribed to users and simply not being used [e.g. 4]. Making pervasive health technologies more attractive to users and more likely to be accepted and integrated into their daily lives is just as important as it is with other products such as mobile phones and digital TVs. It is a significant challenge to design and deploy technologies for the home such that they are easy to set up and use yet configurable by and adaptable to a range of people including end users, friends and family and health and social care professionals [4, 11]. One way to address this challenge is to make these systems multisensory or ‘multimodal’ – that is they are able to offer alternative interaction modalities (such as speech, gesture, touch) for receiving and presenting information [16, 24]. Offering this choice, however, means that users need to be able to configure the system to their own needs and preferences. End-user configuration of home care technologies allows personalisation and can potentially result in a system that is more appropriate to the users’ needs, preference and social and physical context [11, 24]. This configuration can take place at set up (with help from friends or carers for example) and/or more dynamically as a person learns to use the system in a way that suits his/her needs and preferences over time. Such flexibility however introduces an additional design challenge. How will users want (and be able) to configure the system? Additionally, what factors influence configuration decisions or behaviors in the context of the home? This paper describes the user centred development of a home care reminder system that is both multimodal (can present reminders in different ways to a variety of sensory modalities) and highly configurable by the end user (users can select which reminders to receive and exactly how they wish to receive them). Development of this reminder system involved formative Co-Design sessions with six groups (N=25) of older users (age 60+) where they were they PervasiveHealth 2012, May 21-24, San Diego, United States Copyright © 2012 ICST DOI 10.4108/icst.pervasivehealth.2012.248684