Ageing societies and the associated pressure on the care systems are major drivers for new developments in socially assistive robotics. To understand better the real-world potential of robot-based assistance, we undertook a 10-week case study in a care home involving groups of residents, caregivers and managers as stakeholders. We identified both, enablers and barriers to the potential implementation of robot systems. The study employed the robot platform Pepper, which was deployed with a view to understanding better multi-domain interventions with a robot supporting physical activation, cognitive training and social facilitation. We employed the robot in a group setting in a care facility over the course of 10 weeks and 20 sessions, observing how stakeholders, including residents and caregivers, appropriated, adapted to, and perceived the robot. We also conducted interviews with 11 residents and caregivers. Our results indicate that the residents were positively engaged in the training sessions that were moderated by the robot. The study revealed that such humanoid robots can work in a care home but that there is a moderating person needed, that is in control of the robot.
We examine how WeChat has been adopted to support nurse-patient communication in an IVF clinic in China. In this setting, the biggest challenge to delivering high-quality patient-centred care is the large number of patients. Nurses typically spend less than five minutes with each patient during clinical visits. To compensate for such minimal in-person consultation, nurse-facilitated patient groups were created on WeChat, to extend medical care and facilitate peer support. Through an ethnographic study, we examined how these groups fit into the clinic's communication ecosystem, and the challenges they raise for nurse-facilitators who receive thousands of messages daily. We propose a set of design suggestions aiming to make the work of the nurse-facilitator easier and more effective. In highlighting the opportunities and challenges of using chat to extend care beyond the clinic, we contribute to a burgeoning discussion of how chat can support patient care in the Global South.
There has been increasing interest in designing for dementia in recent years. Empirical investigation is now needed of the long-term role of caregivers in appropriating ICTs into the complex daily life of people with dementia (PwD). We present here the outcomes of a 4-month evaluation of the individual, social and institutional impact of a videogame-based training system. The everyday behavior and interactions of 52 PwD and 25 caregivers was studied qualitatively, focusing on the role played by caregivers in integrating the system into daily routines. Our results indicate that the successful appropriation of ICT for PwD depends partly on the physical, cognitive and social benefits for PwD, but especially on the added value perceived by their social care-network. We discuss the need for design in dementia to develop more socially embedded innovations that can address the social actors involved and thus contribute to practical solutions for professional and private care.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376648
Family members who are separated across time zones can easily miss out on feeling connected. We designed and studied the usage of an asynchronous storytelling system, called FamilyStories, to explore the use of audio-based sharing. FamilyStories allows family members to share activities and experiences over distance in different time zones using three different devices that contain different contextual features. To evaluate the design, we conducted a five-week long field study with two family member pairs. Our results show the value of slow, flexible, and non-suggestive interfaces for asynchronous audio communication. We also found ephemerality helped in the sharing of 'instant' feelings, while large time zone differences could be 'synchronized' with time delayed messages. We raise these as design opportunities for asynchronous audio storytelling systems.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376486
In this paper, we examine WhatsApp use by nurses in India. Globally, personal chat apps have taken the workplace by storm, and healthcare is no exception. In the hospital setting, this raises questions around how chat apps are integrated into hospital work and the consequences of using such personal tools for work. To address these questions, we conducted an ethnographic study of chat use in nurses' work in a large multi-specialty hospital. By examining how chat is embedded in the hospital, rather than focusing on individual use of personal tools, we throw new light on the adoption of personal tools at work specifically what happens when such tools are adopted and used as though they were organisational tools. In doing so, we explicate their impact on invisible work [77] and the creep of work into personal time, as well as how hierarchy and power play out in technology use. Thus, we point to the importance of looking beyond individual adoption by knowledge workers when studying the impact of personal tools at work.