Development of a housework sharing system for life support

Abstract

In recent years, the ratio of dual income families has increased remarkably. On the other hand, dual income families tend to have various problems for housework, e.g. looking after children, sharing housework, finding time for communication, etc, because they have limited time at home. In this context, it should be very useful for them if they can share housework in a well-balanced way, so in this paper, we develop a housework sharing support system for dual income families to reduce their burden. Our system supports sharing information in a family and knowledge about housework, recommending appropriate housework for that time, and reporting how much family members contribute to housework in order to promote their motivation for the work. The system itself is built in a tablet PC so that it can be used like a whiteboard that we often use to share information with family members. We verified the usefulness of our system by conducting experiments in which several communities with different life-styles used our system in their everyday lives over a period of weeks.