The Waag Society in Amsterdam developed, already in 2002, a “non verbal remote communication tool to support emotional communication”, targeting 80+years old.
Storytable offers a “multimedia jukebox” to stimulate memory and reminiscing and to encourage social interaction in elderly persons.
The Storytable is “intelligent furniture with footage from the 1920ies ot the 1950is”, also offering an Oral History database, continuously adjourned. Let’s see how it is works:
“This interface, designed in close cooperation with seniors, makes it possible for them to listen to or play digital multimedia clips from a large database. These multimedia clips contain songs, TV commercials, news broadcasts and other images from the 1900’s to present day. These clips are designed to reflect important events in a senior’s life. The Storytable’s navigation system was designed to make modern technology easily accessible to seniors. Thus, two “intelligent” buttons provide access to search and play the multimedia clips”.

Some weeks ago I discovered the educational project “Hole in the Wall” by Sugata Mitra, addressing children from Indian villages, and although that is not the same, it is interesting to note how we tend to forget that a large part of the population lacks the basic “technical literacy” to enjoy the wonders of Web 2.0.

Peeping in the ACE conference venue, I came across Noldus, a complete system to analyze complex interaction - they use the term user-system interaction, interesting alternative to the restrictive HCI and to the overly vague activity monitoring.
It is interesting how many technologies applied usually to single media interaction analysis,
like behavioral observation, video analysis, facial expression reader, for “still” media, and portable cameras to monitor the activity in mobile media, “detecting time relationships between events” and finding “common navigation pathways, task structures, common causes of error, etc”.
I wonder how many other similar softwares are already around - probably the trouble in usability testing is one of the reasons that keep many broadcasters from taking the big leap into crossmedia communication (the fact that BBC has one of the best testing teams in the world is maybe key to the development of BBC interactive and “360° entertainment”).
I also wonder if activity and affective monitoring is enough (it sure is a lot already!) or if narrative involvement, which determines affective reactions and in the end the attachment to the product/story hence the activity, should also be considered. That is, the type or style of the narration and
the relationship with user’s response. I wonder if somebody is already doing this and if anybody knows about it, if you could send me some links.

Technorati Tags: affective research, cross media, usability research