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Taking care of elders in a nursing home is not an easy task. Caregivers face two major problems: a lack of awareness of the situations surrounding the elderly care and the lack of information regarding the availability and the activities of other caregivers to support their coordination process. Various efforts have proposed solutions to cope with these problems, but they do it without considering all the requirements imposed by the criticality of this type of environment. In this paper we propose CANoE, a model for the design of context-aware notifications in critical environments, such as a nursing home. The main feature of this model is that it considers three sources of context (the environment, and the issuer and the receiver of the notification) for adapting the content, the terms of delivery and the presentation of the notification message. Based on the CANoE model we developed the CANoE-Aw and CU-IDA systems, which were evaluated through two case studies in a nursing home. The results of these evaluations provide evidence that caregivers achieved an increased awareness of the situations of care of the elderly and perceived the systems as adequate tools to support their coordination while attending a situation of care.

Several strategies have been identified for designing effective persuasive technologies that encourage people to adopt healthy lifestyle habits. However, there are no general guidelines for implementing these strategies to motivate elders to exercise, neither they have been evaluated to determine how effective they are for the elderly. To design appropriate persuasive technology prone to be adopted by elders, we are following a user-centered approach. In this paper, we report the design and evaluation of an ambient information system for mobile phones, which supports the following strategies for persuasion: abstraction, historical information and reflection, triggers for exercising, and positive and playful reinforcement.

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