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This paper describes research in supporting close family members living apart to keep in touch with each other. We introduce an awareness system for supporting lightweight social communication between mobile individuals and people at home. Communication is based on pictures, short messages and reachability information. A field test has provided empirical evidence that affective benefits, to this point only hypothesized by researchers in awareness systems, are indeed experienced by users of our system.
Markopoulos et al. (Sat,) studied this question.