About the MMH Project

MultiMemoHome is a research project aiming to develop user-friendly, accessible and effective reminder systems in order to improve home care. Our primary goal is to use modern technology to support people who require regular care or assistance at home. We hope that this will help to provide a higher standard of living, reduce stress on carers and family, and allow people to remain in their own homes independently for longer.

In order to reach this goal we're researching how different people live, identifying the things people forget and the methods used to remember things around the home. We're also investigating the technology required to deliver reminders to people of various ages, backgrounds and abilities. Most importantly, we're trying to research technology that is practical, affordable and suitable for use in everyday life.

The MMH project is a research project between the University of Glasgow, the University of Edinburgh and Queen Margarets University. The University of Glasgow team will investigate aspects of multimodal interaction while the University of Edinburgh will research speech based interaction.

The MMH project started on 1st October 2009 and is expected to conclude in spring 2013. We held our inaugural project meeting on the 24th November 2009. The project is funded by the EPSRC, and the project's grant details can be found on the EPSRC website.

The following sections provide a more detailed overview of the MMH project. Clicking on the links below will take you to the relevant section.

• Reminders and Home Care Systems
• Multimodal Interaction
• Technology & Everyday Life
• Our Aims and Objectives

Reminders and Home Care Systems

With an ageing population throughout Europe, and similar trends emerging in other countries, it's apparent that preparations will need to be made to support a larger aged population. While post-war baby-boom is often considered the primary reason for the predicted surge in people over retirement age, modern medicine has increased our life expectancy, suggesting that this trend will continue.

As the population ages, many will develop health problems that will require care. In some cases this care is provided by family, in others by paid carers. With a significant rise in people requiring care, it becomes more likely that many will be placed into care homes. Home care systems can assist people living in their own homes, reducing their dependence on carers; as a result they are able to remain at home for longer, maintaining their dignity and independence.

Home care systems vary in size, function and complexity. A common function intended to support independent living is a reminder system, which can deliver alarms, warnings and information to the user. There are many uses for reminders in the home, such as reminders to take medication, event and appointment reminders, or even reminders to lock doors or turn off taps.

There is already considerable research on the design of alarms and warnings for workplaces such as aircraft cockpits and hospitals. However, there are appreciable differences between the home and workplace. Home users are not highly trained experts, and there are many subtle social factors in our homes that do not exist in the workplace. Given the multitude of cultural, personal and social attributes that dictate how we live, developing a home care system that is effective and user-friendly is a formidable task.

There is a clear need for improved home care systems. With our aging population, there will soon be a significant demand for friendly, affordable and effective systems for home care. The primary purpose of our research is to identify the technology that can satisfy these requirements.

Multimodal Interaction

Users of home care technology are very likely to have one or more sensory impairments such as sight or hearing loss. Multimodal interaction uses one or more of the senses in order to convey information; as such, it is ideal for creating systems for people with sensory impairments. Multimodal interaction usually considers sight, sound, touch and smell, discounting taste because it is highly impractical.

Auditory reminders in the home are common, from mobile phones to microwave ovens. Audio reminders are usually simple sound alerts, speech, or structured non-speech sounds known as earcons. For example, you could be alerted to a full bath by a simple beep, a spoken sentence, or an earcon where the pitch is relative to how full the bath is. There is little research comparing speech and non-speech reminders; we will be investigating this as part of our research.

Touch and smell based interaction is especially useful for people who have both eyesight and hearing impairments. Tactile feedback has been used in sensory substitution systems for many years, for example to present audio signals to users with hearing impairments. Most phones now use tactile feedback for alerts. There is much potential for this type of reminder, as it is private and no-one but the recipient would know a reminder had occurred.

Although it's often considered impractical, smell has a lot of potential in a reminder system context. In everyday life a smell often grabs our attention, especially if we cannot identify it or where it came from. Smell also has links to memory and emotion. Although smell-based reminders have been compared to other modalities, these studies have been limited in size and scope, ignoring the potential for smell in the home. A simple example of such a reminder would be the smell of food to remind a person it is time to eat.

Multimodal interaction has been explored for jobs with a high mental workload, for example pilots and nurses. It's also been used in toys like the Nintendo Wii and to add to the functionality of mobile devices such as the iPhone. From a research point of view, it is often neglected when considering accessibility, and there is very little research regarding the possibilities of multimodal interaction in home care settings.

Technology & Everyday Life

The home is a complex environment, affected by a number of personal, social, and cultural factors. This is often ignored by reminder systems, which might deliver reminders with no consideration of the social setting, often resulting in reminders being switched off to avoid annoyance or embarrassment. We believe that systems should be able to present sensitive reminders in a more subtle way. For example, when visitors are present, toileting reminders could be given as vibration to the skin or a non-speech sound that only the intended recipient can decode, avoiding embarrassment while remaining fully functional.

Traditional reminders often disregard user preferences. In current commercial products the range of reminder types is often limited, as is the ability to easily switch between them. Allowing users to adapt the reminders to their own preferences using an alternative modality would make them more acceptable. The more power the user has to customize the system, the better the system can be made to fit into the home environment and the lifestyle of the user.

Once a reminder has disrupted a user during a task, the user might not be able to return to it easily. Disruptiveness can result in annoyance or confusion, which in turn may lead to the reminders being switched off or ignored. Disruption might even cause users to lose their balance and fall. Hence, badly designed reminders might cause the accidents they were supposed to help avoid. Although disruptiveness is a serious problem, little is known about the actual disruptiveness of different types of reminders in the home.

Intrusiveness is also an issue when considering the acceptability of reminders. Audio and smell-based reminders may intrude on people who are in the same room as the intended recipient; they can also interfere with existing sounds and smells. Tactile reminders require that the reminder device be constantly worn by the user, which potentially restricts what the user can do.

The home is a personal place, and as such must be treated with respect. For a reminder system to be accepted into the home, it must consider the properties of disruptiveness, intrusiveness, adaptability and privacy. Ignoring any one of these factors could result in the system being rejected, ignored or disabled by the user. A large part of our research will involve investigating the role of context in the effectiveness and acceptability of reminders.

Our Aims and Objectives

The key research question of this project is how reminder systems can be designed for the home that are effective, adaptable, acceptable and accessible to users. We will address this question by:

1. Exploring the home as an interaction space using user-centred methods in order to improve our understanding of user needs and the context of reminders in a home care setting.
2. Creating and validating appropriate and usable multimodal reminders and testing in real home care settings.
3. Testing and validating methods and guidelines for designing and supporting end-user configuration of home care reminder systems, in order to suit user abilities, preferences, care needs and context.

The anticipated outcomes of this research are:

1. Detailed understanding of the use of reminders in the home context.
2. Detailed comparisons of speech and non-speech auditory reminders.
3. Investigation of touch and smell based reminders.
4. Comparison of the four modalities (smell, touch, sound and sight) with multimodal reminders that have been validated in a home care context.
5. Methods and guidelines for configuring multimodal reminders that will be usable and accessible to all relevant stakeholders.

The ultimate aim of our work is to make home care reminder systems usable and effective. This can transform lives by allowing people to live more independently. Our work is timely as it ties in with current, widespread initiatives to design technology that will support and prolong independent living in the home. We aim to develop guidelines and a configuration tool that can be used by people who receive care as well as their carers to make an informed choice from the large variety of configurations possible. With the involvement of our partners and experience gained from the MATCH project, we hope to develop wide-reaching practical technologies that can be used in real world applications.