Towards a social fabric for pervasive assistive environments

The digital divide refers to a lack of technological access, part of which involves exclusion from a blooming arena of social interaction. People without mobile phones or PCs cannot access email, SMS or social networking websites; this includes many groups, such as the elderly, who can become vulnerable without good social contact. By enabling multimodal access to a variety of communication channels, including ubiquitous ones such as televisions and home telephones, this set of people can be included in such interactions. This paper describes a prototype pervasive messaging infrastructure for multimodal communications, and how it can be used as an assistive environment. Our eventual aim is to create a social fabric, a pervasive infrastructure layer to support more complex social experiences in the future. Copyright 2009 ACM.