Experience Tags: Enriching Sensor Data in an Awareness Display for Family Caregivers

The design of awareness displays to support family care has been explored in many recent studies. Whereas user studies indicate that caregivers are interested to know seniors’ subjective experiences regarding activities, events and general attitudes, product developers tend to focus on using sensors to automatically detect the state and context of seniors in time, resulting in systems that are unable to capture the seniors’ experiences. This short paper presents experience tagging, a mechanism which enables end-users to enrich sensor data using subjective tags. A research concept of an awareness display for family caregivers is presented to illustrate how the mechanism can be integrated in the design of an awareness display. The preliminary findings from a 4-week field trial with three caregiver/senior couples are presented. As a next step, the use of experience tags could be studied in other settings where people or systems are interested to know the user perspective on sensor data.