| Summary: | People are increasingly moving away from their families for work, studies or simply to start an independent life. Yet people in close interpersonal relationships may wish to stay connected with their families to maintain closeness in their relationship. Parent-adult children relationships are especially important as they can be the most long lasting and stable relationships in a person's life and have an effect on overall happiness and psychological wellbeing. Researchers in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have recognised the need to support distant family relationships and there have been a large number of devices created to support close interpersonal relationships. However, previous studies have focused on designing technologies to connect friends, lovers or families in general, yet different relationships may have different needs and something that is desirable for a particular relationship may not be desirable for others. Limited research has been conducted focusing on supporting parent-adult children relationships nor do these studies focus on supporting closeness and connectedness in distant relationships. The fast spreading use of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies provides opportunities for connecting people over distance however much of the current research focuses on tackling technical issues around IoT and there is not much research exploring the role of the user and their experiences with the IoT or how IoT technologies could be designed to connect people over distance.
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