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We study the effects of digital photo sharing on social connectedness of people with special needs. We target people dealing with a transition in life that forced them to live away from their family and friends. Our study included four people with spinal-cord injury staying in a rehabilitation centre and eight elderly people staying in a nursing home. Each participant was provided with a web-enabled digital photo frame and their family members were provided with a camera phone. The results of our study show positive effects. For rehabilitants photo sharing simplified the way they could reconnect to their family. For the elderly people, photo sharing served as 'food for talk'.

Appropriate design of the interaction between humans and robots will be a crucial factor for the acceptance of new robotic products. Apromising approach is to equip robots with life-like and social characteristics. A coherent personality expressed through behavior can help users to understand and predict the behavior of a robotic appliance. In this paper, we describe existing design approaches and arguethat an integrated design process is needed.

We present a prototype of a personalized recipe advice system, whichfacilitates its users to make health-aware meal choices based onpast selections.To stimulate the adaptation of a healthier lifestylea goal setting mechanism is applied in combination with personalizedrecipe suggestions.

In this case study, we designed a family game to explore whether this could be an effective and fun approach for raising the awareness of family members towards their energy use and, in the long run, to provide an effective tool for affecting their habits regarding sustainable behavior. The design of the family game implemented the metaphor of electricity as flowing liquid, fostered fun experiences and supported competitive and social elements. Dutch families with children, aged 5-11 years, participated in the design and evaluation of theconcept. We obtained valuable insights into the use and understanding of electricity by the families, how the families looked at responsible behaviors around their usage and how a game could integrate into the family context in a fun way.

This research explores how context sensing and ubiquitous communication media can support remote family members with new ways of caringfor each other using awareness systems. An important design dimension in awareness systems is reflected by the concepts of symmetry andsocial translucence. We explore the effect of ensuring symmetry versus ensuring social translucence upon the social connectedness and the privacy satisfaction that people experience through the use of anawareness system. We built the SoPresenT prototype which uses audioand video technologies to support these concepts. We are currently investigating these through controlled experiments.