Assisted living, Assistive technology.

Team 10 CPSC 481 Spring 2019

Index

Stakeholders and Users

• Developers/Designers
  • the developers and designers will need lots of training to be able to implement this app to the best of their abilities, using research and IDEO methods. Their background knowledge may consist of personal background, but also secondary research from creating the best product possible. They will be the main people involved in the User-Centered Design, other than the users themselves.
• Sponsors of project
  • Sponsors will have no training, and very little background knowledge. They will not be part of the design process.
• Healthcare (Doctors/Nurses)
  • Healthcare Agents have extensive knowledge, but will not have any training of the application as it is not designed for them. As such, they will not play a part in the User-Centered Design.
• Patient suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease
  • The patient will have little to moderate background knowledge on Alzheimer’s Disease, as the condition becomes a big part of their life. They will have extensive training/experience with the application, as we hope the platform will provide daily support in their lives. The patient relates to the design of the system as the main character of the User-Centered Design, being the problem in the investigation phase, and being centered for solutions in the ideate phase.
• Family/Caretakers
  • Informal
    • Informal Caregivers, consisting of family members, will range from having little to extensive knowledge on Alzheimer’s Disease, as they help support the patient. They will receive extensive training/experience with the application, as they are the main targeted users. Other than the patients themselves, the design of the application will be targeted towards the informal caregivers such that it provides maximum usability. As such, for all phases of the User-Centered Design, they will be considered.
  • Formal
    • Formal Caregivers, consisting of social workers and occupational therapists, will have extensive knowledge on dealing with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, but they will not receive much training for the application, as they are not a targeted group of users. As such, they will not really be considered for the design process.
  • Professional (Doctor/Nurses)
    • See above at Healthcare.

Interviews

Download Informal Caregiver-1 Interview
Download Informal Caregiver-2 Interview
Download Formal Caregiver-1 Interview
Download Formal Caregiver-2 Interview

Interview method was chosen in order to be able to ascertain characteristics of informal and formal caregivers, and also to view perceptions of users on the patients and the burden placed on them. We were able to interview four individuals composing of formal and informal caregivers. Using the Zarit Burden Interview, we were able to place the burden of taking care of a patient with Alzheimer’s Disease upon the caretakers in the moderate range. The main problem we are trying to face now would be: How to lower user’s burden through our functionalities?
Using these four interviewees, we were able to paint a picture on which functionalities were useful, which seemed useless, and provide understanding through the user’s view on how the application may increase or decrease the amount of burden placed on the user. Another point that we asked our interviewees was, due to the nature of the condition, whether or not the patient themselves should have the functionalities. Most of the functionalities should also be possessed by the patient.
Discussing burden, the majority of the functionalities would lower the burden. However the following two functionalities would increase burden placed.

• Patient Paging Ability
  • The caretakers believed that this ability would increase the burden. They believed that this ability would be misused constantly. Therefore, the users suggested the ability to turn on/off the feature.
• Panic Button
  • Just like the paging ability, the caregivers believed the button may be overused, causing stress levels of caregivers to increase.

Use of Interview Method

Download Interview Questions
Download Zarit Burden Interview

The interview method went very smoothly, and we were able to gather a lot of data through using both structured and opened questions. The only difficulty with the interview method was when we used open structure of asking questions about the functionalities, we still had to guide the interviewee such that they understood exactly what we were expecting from the functionality - if not, they gave vague answers that did not provide much useful information. Hence, next time, there may be more benefit to include a more detailed description for the caretaker before we ask open questions.

Secondary Research

Download research document

Secondary Research was chosen due to the groups inexperience with patients suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, and lack of knowledge of the disease itself. Hence, we required Secondary Research to develop a point of view on the subject and design issues. The secondary research conducted has been instrumental in forming a more educated perspective on the landscape of problems caregivers and patients afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease face. The first listed source compares the benefits of various ICT interventions on informal caregivers of people living with dementia (of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form). This study is directly relevant to our application, and also highlights a number of phone services currently available to people in these situations. The second source provided some statistics about the demographic of caregivers and people suffering from dementia. The third source gave good information about assisted living settings. This is mainly pertaining to formal caregivers in these assisted living homes, but also brings to light some potential issues we could address with our application.

Use of Secondary Research

Overall, the secondary research method has been effective in providing general information about the people our app could be used by. However, it is still hard to confirm our proposed functionality would be useful with purely secondary research. Thus, we also did interviews with informal caregivers to get direct feedback on our ideas. We will likely continue to use sources like these when evaluating more specific functions later on.

Competitive Product Survey

Download Competitive Product Survey

Competitive Product Survey was used in order to collect, compare and conduct evaluations of the product’s competitions. We used the information gathered to establish certain functionalities and how they compare to our own, and to also compare the goals of different apps to ours. The applications tried to directly solve a certain problem that patients face such as:

• Big fonts and calendars to deal with the inability to read small fonts.
• Location services to deal with wandering.
• Timed Pillboxes to ensure medicine is taken at a timely manner.
  We have taken this information and the goals of the applications in order to ensure that our application will have all the necessary functionalities to maintain the patients standard of living. While the information provided from this research method mainly shed light on applications to patients with Alzheimer’s Disease, our application will be strongly focused towards the informal caregivers.

Use of Competitive Product Survey

Due to the nature of our product, since we have a differing main audience, the information gathered using this method was not very helpful. As this was a by-product of secondary research however, not much time was allotted to this method, hence if we did the project again, it would be acceptable to contain this method as long as it was not the primary or secondary research method.