The Tangible Reminder

Abstract

Today's computer systems rely on standard input and output hardware which often complicates the tasks of interacting and mapping. The Tangible Reminder introduced in this paper presents an highly usable, self explanatory, real life interface. It's task is to keep track of appointments, giving an overview over their current states and reminding the user of upcoming events. For that purpose it integrates calm ambient display technology with tangible interfaces to give a non interruptive overview. While it supports peripheral perception it nonetheless grasps the user's attention whenever necessary.

Mobility Assistance in the Bremen Ambient Assisted Living Lab

“…Home automation can be further supplemented by using standards such as EiB/KNX, LON or Powerline to control household devices (such as the refrigerator) or “UPnP” to control media devices. An important development trend is the idea of unifying complete control of the environment (in one system) and employing customer-specific software drivers and universal input/output devices for control (Vanderheiden & Zimmermann, 2007; Zimmermann, 2007). Here we apply field-bus independent home automation with user-specific profiles, for example, for light scenarios (see below).…”

Mobile Device Interaction in Ubiquitous Computing

“…We have included a brief overview of the Tangible Reminder in the following, for further reading a detailed description can be found in (Hermann et al, 2007). The goal of the Tangible Reminder was to create an easy to use and comprehensible physical installation to deal with appointments and deadlines.…”