The Keep-in-Touch system

We all have a basic need to communicate with family and friends. Message-based communication, based on the written word has been important since earliest civilisations. More recently, email has been a killer application of the internet and SMS the corresponding winner for mobile telephony, precisely because they are message-based and asynchronous. They complement the critical direct communication by enabling people to send messages to each other. When a family lives together in a single house, they still have messaging needs, as reflected in such technologies as the notepad on the fridge. When an extended family is distributed (as nearly all are) the messaging needs can, in fact, intensify and become more complex. They need to go beyond the notepad on the fridge, to systems that are asynchronous in time and space since extended families are usually distributed in different houses, operate on different schedules and are even separated by time-zones. There are also many, potentially important possibilities for message-based communication about status and presence. Asynchronous messaging has the potential to play an important role in supporting communication and maintaining intimacy within family units. In this paper we describe the Keep-in-Touch (KIT) system which provides a messaging appliance that makes it easy for family members to leave audio messages for each other within the home and across distributed family homes. This project crosses the boundaries of many areas of pervasive and ubiquitous computing: ambient information displays, natural user interfaces, information appliances, zero configuration and maintenance, high robustness and reliability (the ‘information toaster’ scenario), privacy, and social acceptability.