Exchanging Graphical Emails Among Elderly People and Kindergarten Children

Email is a convenient tool, however, it is still difficult for elderly people and kindergarten children. If they can learn to use it, their ability to communicate may be remarkably increased. Therefore we developed two kinds of email software ‘Gin-Mail’ for elderly people and ‘Ocha-Mail’ for kindergarten children. They adopt a pen-based interface with a tablet PC. Users write email using Ink function, and software sends it as an attached image file. There are two modes in it, User mode and Maintenance mode. User mode offers only minimal functions to prevent misoperation. We devised each user interface in accordance with the user's characteristics. ‘Ocha-Mail’ and ‘Gin-Mail’ are accessible to kindergarten children and elderly people respectively. Our goal is to encourage interactions among different generations by through the use of email.