WatchMe: Communication and Awareness Between Members of a Closely-Knit Group

WatchMe is a personal communicator with context awareness in a wristwatch form; it is meant to keep intimate friends and family always connected via awareness cues and text, voice instant message, or synchronous voice connectivity. Sensors worn with the watch track location (via GPS), acceleration, and speech activity; this is classified and conveyed to the other party, where it appears in iconic form on the watch face. When a remote person with whom this information is shared examines it, their face appears on the watch of the person being checked on. The working prototype was used as the focus of interviews to gauge the desirability of such a device. WatchMe is a watch-based personal communicator that draws upon features of both mobile telephony and context-aware ubiquitous computing and integrates them in a user interface that is novel to both these domains. WatchMe extracts information from sensors to provide awareness and availability information to one's closest friends. It ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: HUC
• Authors: Natalia Marmasse, Chris Schmandt, David Spectre
• Keywords: HUC 2004, Intimate Friends, Personal Communicator, Synchronous Voice