`Everyone is a winner, help is just a push of a button away. . . ' : the Telecare Plus service in Malta

This paper reports on a research study on the role of assistive technologies in later life. Re- search questions included what is the impact of assistive technologies on the quality of life of older service-users, and to what extent does assistive technology lead to an improved quality of life for subscribers and in- formal carers? The chosen method of enquiry was a case-study of the Telecare Plus service in Malta. A total of 26 semi-structured interviews were held with a convenience sample of 26 people aged 60-plus about their use and experience of this particular telecare system. The Telecare Plus service was found to contribute positively to subscribers' levels of emotional and physical wellbeing, interpersonal relations and personal develop- ment, as well as towards the quality of life of informal carers. However, research also highlighted a range of challenges that stood in the way of increased adoption rates of the Telecare Plus service by older people. The fact that the fi eld of assistive technologies in Malta lacks effi cient and clear business models constitutes another barrier towards the take up of such services.peer-reviewe

Family memories in the home: contrasting physical and digital mementos

We carried out fieldwork to characterise and compare physical and digital mementos in the home. Physical mementos are highly valued, heterogeneous and support different types of recollection. Contrary to expectations, we found physical mementos are not purely representational, and can involve appropriating common objects and more idiosyncratic forms. In contrast, digital mementos were initially perceived as less valuable, although participants later reconsidered this. Digital mementos were somewhat limited in function and expression, largely involving representational photos and videos, and infrequently accessed. We explain these digital limitations and conclude with design guidelines for digital mementos, including better techniques for accessing and integrating these into everyday life, allowing them to acquire the symbolic associations and lasting value that characterise their physical counterparts

Review Essay: Emplacement and everyday use of medications in domestic dwellings

To extend knowledge of relationships between people and domestic settings in the context of medication use, we conducted fieldwork in twenty households in New Zealand. These households contained a range of ‘medicative’ forms, including prescription drugs, traditional remedies, dietary supplements and enhanced foods. The location and use of these substances within domestic dwellings speaks to processes of emplacement and identity in the creation of spaces for care. Our analysis contributes to current understandings of the ways in which objects from ‘outside’ the home come to be woven into relationships, identities and meanings ‘inside’ the home. We demonstrate that, as well as being pharmacological objects, medications are complex, socially embedded objects with histories and memories that are ingrained within contemporary relationships of care and home-making practices

Intuitive Cities: Pre-Reflective, Aesthetic and Political Aspects of Urban Design

Evidence affirms that aesthetic engagement patterns our movements, often with us barely aware. This invites an examination of pre-reflective engagement within cities and also aesthetic experience as a form of the pre-reflective. The invitation is amplified because design has political implications. For instance, it can draw people in or exclude them by establishing implicitly recognized public-private boundaries. The Value Sensitive Design school, which holds that artifacts embody ethical and political values, stresses some of this. But while emphasizing that design embodies implicit values, research in this field lacks sustained attention to largely unconscious background biases or values, rooted in cultural attitudes and personal interests, that lead theorists and planners—often too narrowly—to promote design organized around specific values such as defensibility. In examining these points, I draw on J. J. Gibson, a central figure for some writing on aesthetics and cities, and whom pragmatists and phenomenologists in turn influenced. Taking a cue from pragmatists in particular, I argue Gibson’s perceptual theory of affordances entails a theory of values, meaning our perception and therewith movements are inherently value-based. I advocate design that accounts for relatively constantly held values such as safety, while also handling the vast pluralism that exists and not crushing the aesthetic vibrancy of city life

Consuming use orientated product service systems: A consumer culture theory perspective

Research suggests that product service systems (PSS) may usefully form part of the mix of innovations necessary to move society toward more sustainable futures. However, PSS implementation rates are disappointingly low and an implementation gap has emerged. Drawing on consumer culture theory (CCT), this paper provides insights to help resolve this issue in business to consumer markets. Since consumption of use orientated PSS is analogous to access based consumption, six dimensions of access are set out to analyse a case study of infant car seat provision. Five outcomes are derived from the analysis and these include partial identification with accessed product and interplay of use and symbolic value. This analysis questions the view that PSS do not create sufficient value to overcome a preference for ownership in western societies. Rather, PSS consumption is likely to arise when both functional and symbolic value are extracted by consumers and when PSS are promoted to appropriate consumer groups such as ‘nomads’. Further research is needed to explore these phenomena and address the issues they raise in PSS design processes

’Eyes free’ in-car assistance: parent and child passenger collaboration during phone calls

This paper examines routine family car journeys, looking specifically at how passengers assist during a mobile telephone call while the drivers address the competing demands of handling the vehicle, interacting with various artefacts and controls in the cabin, and engage in co-located and remote conversations while navigating through busy city roads. Based on an analysis of video fragments, we see how drivers and child passengers form their conversations and requests around the call so as to be meaningful and paced to the demands, knowledge and abilities of their cooccupants, and how the conditions of the road and emergent traffic are oriented to and negotiated in the context of the social interaction that they exist alongside. The study provides implications for the design of car-based collaborative media and considers how hands- and eyesfree natural interfaces could be tailored to the complexity of activities in the car and on the road

Social Navigation in a Location-Based Information System

Much of contextaware application research has dealt with the technical aspects of context capturing and how to interpret the context of a user. Little effort has been spent on the experience and usage of these systems. This thesis will present the general aspects of social awareness and present an example on how these concepts can be implemented into a location-based information system to help users navigate a potential information overload. This thesis also states that giving the users an experience of not being alone in the system increases the pleasure of using such a system. However this implies a decrease in privacy. To demonstrate these ideas I will describe a locationbased information system, GeoNotes, built by a group of researchers at SICS, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science. I will state a set of interaction requirements for how to extend the GeoNotes system with functionality for social awareness. Furthermore I will set up functional requirements for those interaction requirements to after implementation be able to conclude which interaction requirements I have been able to implement for. I will also give suggestions on how to position users in a WLAN. The deliverable from this project is a locationbased information system with functionality for social awareness. However, it was not within this project to test the system on true users. Therefore the statement that this functionality can help users to navigate a potential information overload is still just a hypothesis. To retrieve the position of a user in a W-LAN a packet is sent to all base stations in the network. In the first returning packet the mac address of contacting base station is extracted. Each base station is therefore a unique position. Triangulation was discarded due to its sensitivity to noise and weather circumstances, although a system that uses triangulation would have offered a much higher granularity

Extended measurement of an information system's performance

TUsing Neptun as our scholar information system our everyday experience is that it has some annoying problems even today. Some of them are ergonomic, some of them are technical, others have theoretical roots. Perhaps the most annoying of these problems is that that it is usually too slow. This slowness can be very disappointing especially at the beginning of the examination term and at the registration period. In this paper I describe the circumstances of a measurement which shows that much better performance can be reached based on a good data model even in a poorer working environment and even in case of more serious demands.database efficiency, scholar information system

The Commons of the Tragedy

Presents findings from surveys conducted in September and October 2001. Looks at how the Internet was used by millions after the September 11 terror attacks to grieve, console, share news, and debate the nation's response