Bridge: senior citizen care through facilitating reciprocal awareness

An increasing number of senior citizens and the changing nature of traditional Indian family structure call for initiatives that support the social and emotional aspects of senior citizen care. In this paper, we present our early work on designing for non-explicit reciprocal micro-communication between distributed aging parents and their adult children. Our work leverages implicit aspects of face-to-face interactions inherent in a traditional integrated family structure. We present the design and rationale of Bridge, an example manifestation. Bridge is enabled by an embedded sensor system with a smart phone as a gateway to communicate patterns of everyday activities and anomalies if any of seniors and their children to each other. Our goal is to facilitate an inter-personal and inter-generational holistic awareness of each other's environment as openings for engaging in a meaningful conversation and care across distance.