Reminders that make sense: Designing multimodal notifications for the home

This paper argues that reminders or notifications delivered in the home (such as appointments or when to take medication) should be available in multiple modalities (visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory) in order to increase the usability and acceptability of electronic home reminder systems. Briefly reviewing the context of the home as an interaction space this paper introduces some of the issues that can be addressed by exploiting multimodality. The paper goes on to present an overview of the different modalities available for electronic reminder delivery and finally gives an overview of the guidelines for multimodal reminder design emerging from the first year of the MultiMemoHome Project.