Augmenting public reading experience to promote care home residents' social interaction

Institutional care settings are often described as places where residents suffer from social isolation. Although sharing media preferences, consumption patterns and practices is believed to be effective to trigger communications and develop friendships between older adults, it rarely happens in care homes. Our research explores the potential to promote residents' social interaction by augmenting public print media. In this work-in-progress, we started with newspapers as an example to understand residents' information sources, media habits and preferences. We were also interested in their perceptions of the attractiveness and sociability of augmented print media. The findings showed that the participants held positive attitudes on such technologies. Preliminary design requirements were summarized to inform the future development of related social technologies in public caring environments.