66 5 BridgingContextual Gaps withBlended Reality Spaces hardtoimagineotherapproaches.Buteventhoughitworkswellinsomesituations– such as typical office work – it is not at all suitable in many other situations, and especially not for people with special needs, such as those with mental/physical disabilities and elderly people with dementia who lose explicit skills and the ability to understand abstract knowledge. Howcaninteractivesystemseffectivelyhelp with bridgingthe contextualreality gap generated between different users’ perceptions in different contexts? These needs could potentially be addressed in several ways, in particular using the right information ‘context’ and creating the sense of being together with other people in a shared mediated environment. By effectively bridging the contextual reality gap, interactive systems could provide the richest communication, thus making it possible to create more effective collaborativeenvironmentsthat enrich the sense of being together with other participants for healthcare in remote locations. For this to be successful, it is vitally important to pursue a design approach that originates in the pursuit of the senses for specific users and situations, particularly in the case of those who have difficulties dealing with abstract information. Modern societies are quite safely equipped with numerous implementations for people’shealth,bothathealthservicesandinhomes.Butinpractice,thesecarefully designed medical information systems and products often hardly work at all. This is not due to the technology itself, but rather because of design and implementation processes without an appropriate human-centred point of view. For decades, most healthcaresystemfailureshavebeenduetothelackoftruehuman-centredness,even thoughe-healthtechnologieshavebeenevolvingsteadily(Zhang2008).Substantial information is not only to be found in such explicit information as words or charts. People feel it with their bodies, as sensory perceptions. Krippendorff refers to Gibson’s ecological approach to perception that “The process of constructing the meaning relies on the human ability to act so as to change an existing sense to a preferred one” (p. 53). An elderly person living at home intuitively interprets what is of value for their purposes in their current environment and tries to become harmonious with it in everyday life activities. Contextual-emptiness does not mean a communication lack or nothingness. Rather, it indicates a condition that will likely be filled with the contextual cues they prefer. The elderly person comes to understand implicit informationin this contextual space and distinguish the hidden meanings contained in it directly, through his or her body and its implicit knowledge. Several studies showevidencethatsuggeststhatelderlypeoplewithdementiastillmaintainimplicit knowledge, even as their explicit reasoning and memory skills decline (e.g. Zacks et al. 2007; Schacter 1987; Benjamin et al. 1994). This is the key to design technologythat is accessible to all. By understanding what makes sense to the users in their context of being, experiential design of blended reality space can in principle provide a means of bridging the contextual reality gap. This approach does not require users’ forced reasoning to interpret information. By looking at an empty vessel, not as a negative state, but in terms of its capacity to be filled with contextual cues, the risk of a reality gap will be reduced. The sharing of meaning, usually restricted or concealed because of limited capacity of conveyingexplicit information, will be released.