Connecting Families by Sharing the Minutiae of their Lives

Recent studies have shown that in distributed families keeping in touch is essential; this calls for technologies that can connect family members and bring them closer virtually. There are several social networking technologies online, but they are seldom designed for family connectedness and do not cater for the needs of computer-novice relatives. We present Near Dear, an application that brings online tools to an ambient display at home. The ambient display makes it easy for computer-novices to update and access online networking tools. We also conducted a user trial and evaluation of this system which indicated that the developed system is convenient and intuitive.