Background

(In collaboration with WP2)

We want to understand the needs of family/friend caregivers, those that provide unpaid care to older adults with respect to technology Specifically, we want to address what innovative technological solutions currently exist, can be adapted or can be developed to address the unique needs of family/friend caregivers We are focusing on Assistive Technologies (herein “AT”) – devices that can provide a range of benefits to both care recipients and caregivers (we have a more comprehensive definition for your reference if you need it)

INNOVA

We want to find out what AT devices are currently available to caregivers in Canada. We have created a questionnaire about AT devices and we want researchers, family/friend caregivers, elderly care recipients, paid caregivers/medical professionals, community members, AT producers, and designers to be able to give us information on AT devices that currently exist and input on how future AT devices should look. To provide this feedback, researchers, family/friend caregivers, elderly care recipients, paid caregivers/medical professionals, community members, AT producers, and designers will fill out our questionnaire (please see the questionnaire in the excel document provided). We want to use the responses from researchers, family/friend caregivers, elderly care recipients, medical professionals, designers, AT producers, and community members to the questionnaire create a database of information about AT devices. This database would serve two purposes:

  • As a method of data collection for research purposes (specifically for innovators to access so they can see what is already created)
  • As a tool that eventually all these groups (caregivers, care recipients, health care professionals) would be able to access online (beyond the scope of this project at the moment)

Thus, this project involves the development of a new system that functions as:

  • online questionnaire that can be filled out be a variety of audiences such as researchers, caregivers, elderly care recipients, paid caregivers/medical professionals, designers, AT producers, and community members for the purposes of pooling information about AT devices, and
  • an online database which can be digitally accessed by researchers/innovators and easily manipulated for data analysis purposes.

The goal of this project is to create a first prototype of an evolving system that can be used in testing of the questions and database with researchers, family/friend caregivers, elderly care recipients, paid caregivers/medical professionals, designers, AT producers, and community members.