Maintaining patients´ social contacts through displaying nonverbal awareness information on mobile devices

Awareness systems had been invented for supporting groups collaborating simultaneously over a network. They provide each group member with real-time information about the state of affairs on the remote locations of the other members. Awareness systems have also been observed to help remote collaborators develop the same shared sense of community that often emerges within co-located work groups, and this effect of creating or maintaining group cohesion is an important goal in itself. Purely social awareness systems can be employed by any kind of group, e.g. families, without shared work tasks. As a means of preventing loneliness they can be regarded as examples of biomedical technology. In this paper a demonstrator of an awareness-enhanced instant messaging system for elderly living alone is described along with assumptions about group processes that led to its specification.