What should we build?
Large part of care-giving involves supporting activities of daily living (cleansing, grooming, eating, etc.); additional activities such as shopping, banking, medication; discovering and coordinating care-givers and related resources; assuring safety through monitoring, etc. Understanding these needs and developing tools and methods (let us call them Tools of Necessity – TON) to address them has received a lot of attention from all sectors and is a very vibrant area for research, commercial products, and entrepreneurial ventures. However, when asked, elderly overwhelming state they need most help with Living Well – a life of positive interactions, fulfillment, learning, and dignity (let us call these Living Enhancing Tools – LETs).
At the same time care-givers expressed need for help with emotional/cognitive care-giving tasks, learning from the wisdom of other care-givers, and in coping with daily stress (let us call these Burden Easing Tools – BETs). For example, care-giving checklists, engaging activities, tools to help communicate, memory aids, “what should I do” guides, context-based advice, etc.
Technologies
Creating tools to enable Living Well for elderly and care-giving tools (both for patient and self) for care-requires certain technical innovations. Smart phones and Tables are built to deliver highly refined and responsive user experience rivaling video-game machines. Care-giving has just the opposite requirements of simplicity in interface, forgiveness in touch events, acceptable resolution – closer to a kids tablet than a game machine. The applications have to be personalized in their behavior (not just look and feel and user interface themes) to adapt to unique needs of the user and his/her changing cognitive abilities. The advice or options offered to care-givers has to be context sensitive. For example, Helen feeling anxious around 10 AM would call for a different response (may be a cup of coffee and a chair in Sun) than if she was feeling anxious at 3 AM in the morning. The applications themselves should monitor the performance or response of the user and learn patterns to be more effective. Often care-givers need to reach-out and seek advice from other care-givers. However, it will be useful if the advice can be filtered to those few that match the profile of the patient and the care-giver. Essentially, our QET/BET applications should behave like a coach and a care-giver. And they encompass a large variety of exciting set of technologies: mobile computing, adaptive user interfaces, monitoring and learning, crowd-sourcing, analytics/data mining, integration with sensors (Internet of Things), and cloud-computing.