Hi Folks,

Our weekly meeting starts tomorrow (Sept. 12th) at 12:30 in the DGP seminar room. As always, lunch will be provided.

Benett will lead a brainstorming about the design of a guided digital storytelling tool for older adults. Please find a brief introduction below.

Seniors’ needs or interests are often ignored in the design and development of new technologies, causing many new applications that may benefit them to be overlooked. Digital storytelling is one such emerging application, which in its traditional format has been shown to decrease social isolation in older adults by increasing reminiscence. Saving family knowledge inherently requires storytelling, but is burdensome and requires motivation, especially for seniors who will often not see their input as desired and so will not share or socialize. We propose a new multimodal interface that incentivizes seniors to reminisce and tell stories from family photos beyond just the facts of what the photo contains. The proposed authoring tool is based on speech interaction, and allows for the creation of unstructured, free-flowing oral stories by older adult users as guided by the app. This tool is intended to act as a trigger for storytelling by being enjoyable to use and by having shareable outputs (i.e.multimedia stories and automatic, robust photo organization) that preserve family memories, and is expected to decrease social isolation among seniors and preserve family knowledge without undue effort.

Looking forward to seeing you.

Best, Zhicong