This paper reports on two pilot deployments of SonicAIR, a socially oriented ambient awareness system designed to connect the domestic soundscapes of two people. Sensors detect kitchen activities and generate “sonified representations of those activities in a remote location.” SonicAIR is argued to be a valuable technology to “reduce the isolation of seniors living independently.”

The pilots were conducted as a typical human–computer interaction (HCI) ethnographic field study, recollecting the participants’ accounts mainly through diaries and interviews.

After a first stage in which the participants had to learn to recognize the sounds as emanating from the SonicAIR appliance and not from a local source, they reached “a threshold moment of mutuality” and started to link sounds to the remote coparticipant. A significant finding was that, more than linking specific sounds to specific actions, the participants tended to identify the rhythms of the coparticipant’s domestic routine and to develop narratives about the other based on assumptions and depending on shared knowledge.

Even if SonicAIR was not designed as a direct interaction device but as a passive ambient awareness system, the couples developed two types of interaction: communicative adjacency (deliberately triggering “sound at the remote location after hearing a sound triggered by the remote other”) and behavioral interdependence (using the sound cues to speculate about the remote other’s activity, and, “on reflection, deciding to take action oneself that might parallel the remote narrative action”).

Admitting that the scope of the pilot deployments was limited, the findings reported seem to reveal that ambient awareness technologies can afford the opportunity to develop reciprocity of perspectives; in addition, the findings suggest their utility as a complement to medically oriented telecare infrastructures being a resource to reduce isolation in independent living, and allowing the elderly “to engage in shared social responsibility.”

Designers of ambient awareness technologies might also be interested in the suggestions and reflections for design derived by the authors from the findings of the study.