Abstract (Poster)

Keywords: Digital artifacts, early stage dementia, elders, universal sensitive inclusive design, social space, postcards, tangible artifacts, touchscreen tablet application.

In this demonstration, we present ‘Postcard Memories’, an interactive tablet application to create a social space for elders with early stage dementia. The touchscreen tablet application encourages people to create, organize, and send digital postcards that combine photographs and short text with audio and video. Users can send digital or print postcards to family, friends, and caregivers to encourage memory recall and facilitate social interaction. Results from a mixed method user study indicate that people find the interaction with the application enjoyable and meaningful.

• Martha Ladly is a Professor of Design, teaching in the Digital Futures Graduate and Undergraduate Programs at Ontario College of Art & Design University (OCADU), Toronto, Canada, as well as the Inter- disciplinary Master’s Program. Dr. Ladly specializes in teaching and practice-based research in design, art, media, and technology. She is the former Associate Dean, Graduate Studies, at OCADU. Dr. Ladly is a senior researcher with the Mobile Experience Lab and a Network Investigator with the Graphics, Animation, New Media National Centre of Excellence. Dr. Ladly past positions at OCADU include Chair of the Research Ethics Board (2008-2011) and Graduate Program Director of the Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Art, Media, and Design (2009-2011). In addition, she recently led the development of the Graduate Program in Digital Futures. She was the Director of the Canadian digital arts and culture website HorizonZero (www.horizonzero.ca). Dr. Ladly is a Registered Graphic Designer.
• Dr. Frank Rudzicz is an expert in speech recognition and artificial intelligence in applications designed for individuals with special speech characteristics at Toronto (Canada) Rehabilitation Institute (University Health Network). His work in natural language and speech processing is multidisciplinary and involves machine learning, human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, computer vision, speech-language pathology, rehabilitation engineering, digital signal processing, and linguistics. His research augments existing techniques by refining the statistical relationships between neural, articulatory, and acoustic levels of speech within modern automatic speech recognition systems. These augmented speech systems can be for several applications including: i) automated human-computer dialog systems that include speech synthesis to help individuals complete daily tasks and ii) prosthetic communication aids for human-human interaction that modify the acoustics of hard-to-understand speech to make it more under standable. Dr. Rudzicz is also Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto and Associate member, School of Graduate Studies.
• Bryn A. Ludlow is a PhD Student at York University (Toronto, Canada) in the Faculty of Graduate Studies, York and Ryerson Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture. She holds a BFA in Integrated Media from the Ontario College of Art & Design University (2010) and a MA in Health and Aging from McMaster University (2012). Bryn has presented her research on body mapping at national and international conferences, including at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa (2011). Her “Body Spaces” vector illustrations are published in “The Medical Post”, and “Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities”.
• Ana Jofre’s interdisciplinary practice is grounded in a diverse academic background, which includes a PhD in Physics from the University of Toronto (Canada). Ana started pursuing art as a professional practice and exhibiting her work while serving as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Physics at UNC Charlotte, where she conducted and published research in experimental biophysics. At this time, she also completed a BFA with a con- centration in ceramics at the same university. A romantic at heart, she found herself more motivated to make a cultural contribution to society than to collect and publish additional data. She recently completed the MFA program at the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. Her current practice integrates knowledge and methodologies from various disciplines to create aesthetic experiences of ‘presence’.
• Laura Wright is an artist, producer, writer, and interactive designer based in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). She completed a Masters of Fine Art in the Digital Futures Initiative at OCAD University where she explored interactive video, application design, and digital art installations. She recently took part in an international exchange with the American College of Greece in Athens where she worked to re-invigorating the 2004 Olympic venues with digital art interventions. She exhibited an interactive art installation called Arduino Disco for Toronto’s 2013 Nuit Blanche. Wright has a Bachelor of Journalism degree with Honours from Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. She worked for several years as a news reporter and editor for CBC News, based in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories.

Full text (PDF) p. 945-947