Careteam
About Care is a Probe Toolkit created to improve the lives of Caregivers for Dementia through understanding their thoughts and emotions.
About Care is a Probe Toolkit created to improve the lives of Caregivers for Dementia through understanding their thoughts and emotions.
Research Assistant for the Health Design Lab in Emily Carr. We helped Careteam review how to improve caregiver’s experience
A caregivers often go through physical, emotional and mental burnout while taking care of their elderly parent. Not only that, there is a lack of communication and responsibilities being divided evenly, which results in one person to take upon all the responsibility while managing their own family, burning out.
To study what being a caregiver is like and provide insight on how to improve care-giving from a human centered perspective.
Primary Caregivers are often children of the parent with Dementia. With dementia, it not only affects the elderly parent but destroy the social lives of the caregiver.
The final result was a probe made that asked caregivers about their daily activities, support circle and pains and gains. This is to gain more insight on what type of struggles the caregivers have.
We looked at who are the stakeholders involved with taking care of their elderly parent. The direct stakeholders are family members while the friends and neighbours tries to chip in once in a while.
We looked at:
1. The elderly parent would do upon first discovering dementia and how they would cope with such discovery
2. What the family members would do and what they should do at each stage. (Early, Mid, Late stage of Dementia)
Upon checking other competitors out there, we found that right now there are only apps that help with physical and technical support, but emotional support is equally as important.
We looked at how Careteam could provide emotional support and positive energy. Such as starting a conversation about memories you've shared and giving nudges to help the elderly parent work towards goals.
This research really made me understand a lot more about the struggles that caregivers go through, how it affects not just the individual but the entire family and the lack of resources there are to help them.