Developing a computerised home healthcare support system

Over the course of 9 months, I helped develop a computerised system - the Caregiver Support Tool (CST) for assessing and supporting the psychosocial wellbeing of family caregivers for persons with dementia via questionnaires and approved scales. This was an exploratory project to demonstrate the viability of the CST as an addition to future home health care plans. The support tool was designed to be utilised on a tablet style computer system. It used quantitative information in order to determine needs of a carer in real time and provide support by way of documents and videos to address issues in an effort to encourage positive behavioural change in the participants. This was a multi-person, multi-disciplinary research and development project involving social scientists, engineers, clinicians and designers

As part of the team who developed this, I was the primary researcher who conducted the ethnographic interviews and research to understand 'user' needs in response to this new technology. I worked to understand how existing technology and design developments could be swiftly integrated into health and social care systems.