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BackgroundIn the United States, over 15 million informal caregivers provide unpaid care to people with Alzheimer disease (AD). Compared with others in their age group, AD caregivers have higher rates of stress, and medical and psychiatric illnesses. Psychosocial interventions improve the health of caregivers. However, constraints of time, distance, and availability inhibit the use of these services. Newer online technologies, such as social media, online groups, friendsourcing, and crowdsourcing, present alternative methods of delivering support. However, limited work has been done in this area with caregivers.ObjectiveThe primary aims of this study were to determine (1) the feasibility of innovating peer support group work delivered through social media with friendsourcing, (2) whether the intervention provides an acceptable method for AD caregivers to obtain support, and (3) whether caregiver outcomes were affected by the intervention. A Facebook app provided support to AD caregivers through collecting friendsourced answers to caregiver questions from participants’ social networks. The study’s secondary aim was to descriptively compare friendsourced answers versus crowdsourced answers.MethodsWe recruited AD caregivers online to participate in a 6-week-long asynchronous, online, closed group on Facebook, where caregivers received support through moderator prompts, group member interactions, and friendsourced answers to caregiver questions. We surveyed and interviewed participants before and after the online group to assess their needs, views on technology, and experience with the intervention. Caregiver questions were pushed automatically to the participants’ Facebook News Feed, allowing participants’ Facebook friends to see and post answers to the caregiver questions (Friendsourced answers). Of these caregiver questions, 2 were pushed to crowdsource workers through the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. We descriptively compared characteristics of these crowdsourced answers with the friendsourced answers.ResultsIn total, 6 AD caregivers completed the initial online survey and semistructured telephone interview. Of these, 4 AD caregivers agreed to participate in the online Facebook closed group activity portion of the study. Friendsourcing and crowdsourcing answers to caregiver questions had similar rates of acceptability as rated by content experts: 90% (27/30) and 100% (45/45), respectively. Rates of emotional support and informational support for both groups of answers appeared to trend with the type of support emphasized in the caregiver question (emotional vs informational support question). Friendsourced answers included more shared experiences (20/30, 67%) than did crowdsourced answers (4/45, 9%).ConclusionsWe found an asynchronous, online, closed group on Facebook to be generally acceptable as a means to deliver support to caregivers of people with AD. This pilot is too small to make judgments on effectiveness; however, results trended toward an improvement in caregivers’ self-efficacy, sense of support, a...

Introduction: Unpaid informal caregivers of adult care recipients, including persons with dementia, experience multiple unmet information needs and information management challenges. Objectives: To understand the current personal health information management (PHIM) practices in informal caregiving for adults with and without dementia. Methods: Semi-structured interviews were performed with ten informal caregivers-half of whom were caring for persons with dementia-and four formal caregivers at an adult day service. Interviews centered on a paper-based tool distributed by the day service, the CARE Kit, permitting an artifacts analysis of the tools used by participants for PHIM. Qualitative thematic analysis was applied to interview data. Results: Caregivers' PHIM practices aimed to support daily care management and decisionmaking on behalf of care recipients, through: 1) information acquisition and integration across multiple sources and records; 2) information maintenance, updating, and use over time; and 3) information sharing and communication with healthcare professionals and other family caregivers. Participants reported advantages and challenges of their PHIM practices and tools, including fitting PHIM into their daily lives, managing PHIM-related cognitive workload, the functionality of PHIM tools, and the dynamic, longitudinal nature of PHIM. Conclusion: The study produced a number of implications for caregiver health information management information technology (CHIM IT), based on findings about the nature of caregivers' practices for managing information for adult care recipients. We present CHIM IT requirements related to privacy and security, customization and flexibility, ease of use, credibility and sensitivity, situation awareness, information integration, delegation and shared use, updating and maintenance, archiving and versioning, communication, agency and information access, and validation.

Personal informatics applications have been gaining momentum with the introduction of implicit data collection and alert mechanisms on smart phones. A need for customized design of these applications is emerging and studies on tailoring UI design based on the personality traits of users are well established. This poster investigates how various affordances in gamified personal informatics applications affect motivation levels to track and achieve goals for users with different personality types. We conducted a study to examine how user personality traits relate to (1) motivational affordances in behavior tracking applications and (2) the specific behaviors users prefer to track.

Researchers and designers find it challenging to use traditional methods to establish cognitive and affective empathy with persons with dementia (PWD) and informal caregivers of PWD (CPWD). We used participatory design (PD) to learn about and design for the experiences of PWD and CPWD. Here, we present our experience applying PD in a design project with PWD and another with CPWD. We discuss challenges we faced regarding choice of method, relationship with project partners, and working with an older, cognitively impaired population. Finally, we describe lessons learned using PD methods with PWD and CPWD. 1