Social Awareness Support for Meeting Informal Carers’ Needs: Early Development in TOPIC

This paper explores the use of social awareness support as a potential solution to alleviate informal carers’ burden stemming from the heavy physical, psychological, and emotional load habitually associated with their duties. This is a preliminary contribution of the Vienna University of Technology to TOPIC project that is currently under development. In this paper we report on relevant literature, identify and consider technological and interaction challenges, and suggest mobile and ubiquitous computing for ambient solutions. We illustrate our approach by presenting briefly a prototype from our pre-study before concluding the paper.