Evaluating human activity-based ambient lighting displays for effective peripheral communication

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications leverage pervasive sensing and ambient intelligence technologies to enable older people to live independently and to support their social inclusion and connectedness. Wearable sensors can be used to gather the elderly's activities of daily living (ADLs) data, thus enabling remote monitoring. Lately, ambient displays have been deployed to relay activity information in the periphery of the caregivers' attention in order to increase awareness of the activities of the elderly and to create a sense of connectedness. Moreover, there is accumulated evidence demonstrating the ability of ambient displays to influence and promote social connectedness between the elderly and their caregivers. In recent years, intelligent ambient lighting, a subclass of ambient displays, is emerging as an effective tool for conveying physical activity information. Existing literature suggests lighting encodings or configurations combining color, rate of change, position and brightness to communicate such information. Within AAL, there is little empirical evidence surrounding ambient lighting encodings that support this cause effectively. In this paper, we present an exploratory study investigating how potential caregivers perceive and interpret ambient lighting configurations for presenting activity information of the elderly. User preference, change noticeability and accuracy of the interpretation of three ambient lighting configurations were evaluated.