The Digital Pen
Carole Rennie Grieve completed a 10 week summer project investigating the use of Smartpen technology in the home to aid memory and increase independence of older people. In this project, she created 5 prototype applications for use in the context of the home and worked with older users to evaluate these applications.
The digital pen used in this project was a Livescribe Smartpen which uses Anoto dot patterned paper to allow user recordings to be associated with the unique piece of paper and specific regions of the paper. The applications created enable people to label items around the home, record spoken messages when writing on the paper, and play back the messages when the pen is pointed at the written region.
Using a focus group, we looked at how people might use the pen and paper to remind themselves to do things (calendars and diaries), label items around the home with extra instructions on how to use them (such as labeling a TV remote control) and even annotate instructions onto medication labels to remind them when and how to take their pills during the course of a day. The outcome from this focus group showed that the use of smartpen technology could be adopted by older users for use in the home.
The medication compliance research was continued in Carole's fourth year project and a MSci project that also used the digital pen.
Researchers
Carole Grieve (Summer Student)
Carole graduated with a degree in Computing Science. She was involved in the MMH Project, completing a summer project investigating the use of digital pens in the home to help aid memory and increase independence of older people. This research was further developed in her fourth year individual project where further requirements were gathered and a toolkit of re-usable code for pen applications was created. This project also researched digital pen use in another context- museum interaction using artifact labels and worksheets. Other than computing, Carole is interested in sport and movies.
Dr Marilyn McGee-Lennon (Researcher Co-Investigator)
Marilyn is a senior research fellow with a BSc in psychology and a PhD in computer science. Marilyn has over 10 years of teaching and research experience in the field of HCI. Her expertise includes multimodal interaction and user-centred design & evaluation. Marilyn specialises in health care and home care systems, and was recently a Research Fellow on the MATCH project, conducting user-based studies of home care technology and designing multimodal interfaces suitable for home care. She is one of the most experienced researchers in user-centred multimodal interaction in the UK, and one of few with any knowledge of multimodal design for home care settings. Marilyn lives in Glasgow with her husband Peter and enjoys live music, playing netball, watching football, and Las Vegas.
Publications
