Abstract.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 supports multiple modes of verbal communication (text messaging, voice messaging, and synchronous voice communication) enabling the recipients of the awareness information to choose the best communication modality. Photographs serve as emotional references to our loved ones, appearing on the watch when one of them is thinking of us. MotivationEveryone has a small group of people with whom they are emotionally close, a set of people who are very important in their lives. These are typically family members and/or intimate friends; people from our "inner circle" whom we call insiders. Nothing can replace the richness of face-to-face communication with these people; however, with our ever mobile and hectic lives, that is not always possible. Our aim is to use mobile communication ubiquitous computing to enable these people to keep in contact with each other. We would like to increase and facilitate communication, in a variety of modalities, among these small sets of intimate people. It is our hypothesis that people would want communication with this very select group of dear people