Bumsoo Kang
KAIST, Daejeon, Korea, Republic of
Aging often comes with declining social interaction, a known adversarial factor impacting the life satisfaction of senior population. Such decline appears even in family--a permanent social circle, as their adult children eventually go independent. We present MomentMeld, an AI-powered, cloud-backed mobile application that blends with everyday routine and naturally encourages rich and frequent inter-generational interactions in a family, especially those between the senior generation and their adult children. Firstly, we design a photographic interaction aid called mutually stimulatory memento, which is a cross-generational juxtaposition of semantically related photos to bring natural arousal of context-specific inter-generational empathy and reminiscence. Secondly, we build comprehensive ensemble AI models consisting of various deep neural networks and a runtime system that automates the creation of mutually stimulatory memento on top of the user's usual photo-taking routines. We deploy MomentMeld in-the-wild with six families for an eight-week period, and discuss the key findings and further implications.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445688
The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)