their natural settings, we found that the families successfully collaborated to combat the memory issues in a number of ways.
• Important information was stored and exchanged between family members and external artifacts. The artifacts served as mechanisms around which family members organized their activities and updated their schedules.
• Even though individual strategies for coping with amnesia involve repetition, I was surprised to see that the entire family was involved in repetitive processes to increase the reliability and availability of information.
• Families succeeded because they worked together very closely, as a unit. For example, family members often kept track of daily events of their relative with amnesia and would provide reminders throughout the day.
While the families succeeded in working together, they faced difficulties because of the memory impairment.
• Primary caregivers reported that they were overwhelmed with the amount of information they needed to manage, such as their own appointments, appointments of the care recipient, medication dosages, and various reminders. This led to increased effort and was a significant burden on caregivers, some of whom gave up full-time employment to make time to perform these activities.
• Family members differed in their opinions about what was important to remember or wh o should do the work of recording it. This often resulted in important information being left unrecorded. • The amount of effort required and differences in opinions appeared to evoke high levels of stress in families.
2. Automate redundancy, synchronization, and tight coupling
Technologies to help families remember together can be useful, but designing collaborative tools for multiple users in multiple locations poses some challenges. Designers should allow users to access information from multiple places, have information from various artificial sources automatically synchronize to maintain accuracy, and enable family members to work together even when they are not in the same place.
3. Increase awareness of information access and updates
Families wanted to know when and how other people processed information. It is important for assistive technologies to provide information about whether family members received information and whether they took correct actions upon receiving it.
Presently, families work hard to adapt artifacts not designed with family systems in mind. Hence, rather than just focusing on individual rehabilitation, as designers and practitioners we should shift our focus to the rehabilitation of the entire family system and place our efforts in designing collaborative rehabilitation technologies.
[ 1] Wu, M., Baecker, R., and B. Richards. “Participatory design of an orientation aid for amnesics.” In Proceedings ACM CHI 2005: Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, 511–520, 2005.
[ 2] Hersh, N., and L.
Treadgold. “NeuroPage:
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This research would not have been possible without the guidance of my supervisor, Dr. Ron Baecker, and my collaborators, Dr. Brian Richards from Baycrest, Dr. Jeremy Birnholtz from Cornell University, and Mike Massimi from the University of Toronto.
Our findings suggest that new tools that facilitate shared remembering, discussion, and coordination can be useful. Here are several strategies for improving the design of assistive technologies and for facilitating information sharing in families:
1. Make reliable storage easy and available
Families frequently accessed and recorded important information, and this needed to be done quickly and reliably. Therefore, recording and access to information must be easy and instantaneous.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mike Wu is a Ph.D. student in computer science under the supervision of Professor Ron Baecker at the University of Toronto. Mike’s research interests include assistive technologies, interactive computer tabletops, and educational games for children. He has worked in the
Collaborative User Experience group at IBM Research and the DiamondSpace team at Mitsubishi Electronic Research Labs. Mike holds an M.Sc. from the University of Toronto and a B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia. For more information, please visit: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~mchi.
[ 3] Wu, M., J. Birnholtz, R. Richards, R. Baecker, and M. Massimi. “Collaborating to remember: a distributed cognition account of families coping with memory impairments.” In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems, 825–834, 2008.
DOI 10.1145/1390085.1390089
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