A growing social problem in the U.S., and elsewhere, is enabling older adults to continue living independently, as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. One key part of this complex problem is providing awareness of senior adults day-to-day activities, promoting "peace of mind" for extended family members. The Digital Family Portrait (DFP) is one approach to providing peace of mind that has shown promise. To date, research on the DFP has been limited to wizard-of-oz based experiments over short periods of time. This paper describes a DFP field trial in which a private home was instrumented with sensors rather than relying on input from wizard-of-oz technology. This field trial was conducted over a period of one year between an aging parent living alone in her own home and her adult child living 50 miles distant.

A growing social problem in the U.S., and elsewhere, is supporting older adults who want to continue living independently, as opposed to moving to an institutional care setting. One key part of this complex problem is providing awareness of senior adults day-to-day activities, promoting peace of mind for extended family members. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a digital family portrait that provides qualitative visualizations of a family members daily life. Leveraging a familiar household object, the picture frame, our design populates the frame with iconic imagery summarizing 28 days. In a final implementation, the digital family portrait would gather information from sensors in the home.