SPAM on the menu: the practical use of remote messaging in community care

Abstract

This paper presents some early design work of the 'Digital Care' project, developing technologies to assist care in the community for user groups with different support needs. Our focus is on developing a SMS Public Asynchronous Messenger (SPAM) system for SMS messaging to a situated display in hostels for ex-psychiatric patients run by a charitable Trust. Such settings pose both methodological and design challenges. We face the methodological challenge to uncover requirements in such a sensitive domain by using ethnography, cultural probes and user workshops. The design challenge in this care setting is to provide support rather than new forms of dependence, and we report on early experiences of the deployed system.