- How sharing caregiving data affects family communication -
Abstract
Previous research has shown that tracking technologies have the potential to help family caregivers optimize their
coping strategies and improve their relationships with care recipients. In this research, we explore how sharing
the tracked data (i.e., caregiving journals and patient’s conditions) with other family caregivers affects home care
and family communication. Although previous works suggested that family caregivers may benefit from reading
the records of others, sharing patients’ private information might fuel negative feelings of surveillance and
violation of trust for care recipients. To address this research question, we added a sharing feature to the
previously developed tracking tool and deployed it for six weeks in the homes of 15 family caregivers who were
caring for a depressed family member. Our findings show how the sharing feature attracted the attention of care
recipients and helped the family caregivers discuss sensitive issues with care recipients.
References
[1] N. Yamashita, H. Kuzuoka, T. Kudo, K. Hirata, E. Aramaki, K. Hattori, “How Information Sharing about Care Recipients by Family Caregivers
Impacts Family Communication,” in Proc. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2018.
[2] N. Yamashita, H. Kuzuoka, K. Hirata, T. Kudo, E. Aramaki, K. Hattori, “Changing Moods: How Manual Tracking by Family Caregivers
Improve Caring and Family Communication,” in Proc. ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), 2017.