We have presented an electronic family newspaper that helps elders to maintain emotional closeness with their beloved ones, by providing awareness of important family events. This information is presented in sections such as, Sports, Entertainment, and Health, in which the family may publish digital images, videos and text describing a family event. The Entertainment section includes a memory game, in which the elders may play with a virtual family member, and occasionally have fun playing with a real relative. The system provides a dual interface that aims to facilitate its adoption by elders and its general usage by other members of their families with access to any computer. In the near future, we plan to conduct a trial evaluation of the system with a couple of families for a period of two or three months. The system will be deployed at elder’s homes and access will be granted to their family members. We expect that those trials will provide additional information to refine our design and will let us to explore some features that could not be understand with our initial evaluation.
Although our system is still in a process of refinement our experiences designing it indicate that elders and members of their families find the approach appealing and richer that their actual communication tools. Based on the feedback of our informants, we perceived that the family newspaper can become a central repository of information that would connect whole families distributed in different cities in Mexico and in the USA and will let them to close the gaps in their relationships due to the temporal and physical distance.
We thank our interviewees and also Professor Jesus Favela at CICESE who provided helpful comments on this work.