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The purpose of this paper is to present a synthesized overview of empirical work carried out in the MultiMemoHome Project in the area of designing multimodal reminders for home care. The paper aims to present an overview of multimodal interaction techniques and how they can be used to deliver messages to the user in a way that is more appropriate to the user's needs, the devices available, and the physical and social environment that the person is in when they receive a message.

The paper argues that electronic reminders or notifications delivered in the home (such as appointments or when to take medication to your phone, computer or TV) should be available in multiple sensory modalities (visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory) in order to increase their usability and acceptability and make them accessible to a wider range of users. This paper supports these arguments by presenting an overview of a series of empirical studies that have been carried out (and reported elsewhere) on the design and evaluation of multimodal reminders for the home.

The paper provides some guidelines and lessons learned on how to design personalisable multimodal reminder systems for the home.

This paper presents a synthesized overview of a body of existing research on multimodal reminder design for the home. Its contribution is in the argument and presentation of empirical findings that support these arguments. A set of guidelines emerging from the body of work is also presented.

An increase in the ageing UK population is leading to new ways of looking at how we deliver health and social care services in the UK. The use of assisted living technology (ALT) and telecare is already playing a part in these new models of care. Yet despite the current advances in the range of technology and networking capabilities in the home, ALT and telecare solutions have not been taken up as eagerly as might have been anticipated. The study reported here used scenario‐based focus groups with a wide variety of stakeholders in home care to identify the existing barriers to the successful uptake of ALTs and telecare in Scotland. Six focus group sessions were conducted with individual stakeholder groups (social care workers, policy makers, telecare installation technicians, older users, informal carers) and five conducted with mixed stakeholder groups. The focus groups used the same home care scenario to identify and categorise the different perceptions, attitudes, and expectations of the various stakeholders when discussing telecare implementation for a fictitious older couple. The emerging themes from the focus groups were analysed and categorised according to the Framework Analysis approach. We present a synthesised list of the current barriers to the uptake of ALTs and telecare ‐ and discuss how each of these barriers might be overcome. If these barriers are addressed, we believe telehealthcare technologies will be better designed, more usable, easier to prescribe effectively, more acceptable to more users in more contexts, and ultimately more common place in homes throughout the UK.