A Unifying Notification System To Scale Up Assistive Services
Charles Consel, Lucile Dupuy, Hélène Sauzeon · 2015
Aging creates needs for assistive technology to support all activities of daily living (meal preparation, dressing, social participation, stove monitoring, etc.). These needs are mostly addressed by a silo-based approach that requires a new assistive service (e.g., a reminder system, a pill prompter) to be acquired for every activity to be supported. In practice, these services manifest their silo-based nature in their user interactions, and more specifically, in the heterogeneity of their notification system. This heterogeneity incurs a cognitive cost that prevents scaling up assistive services and compromises adoption by older adults. This paper presents an approach to scaling up the combination of technology-based, assistive services by proposing a unifying notification system. To do so, (1) we propose a decomposition of assistive services to expose their needs in notification; (2) we introduce a notification framework, allowing heterogeneous assistive services to homogeneously notify users; (3) we present how this notification framework is carried out in practice for an assisted living platform.