Clinical Services

ePoster Presentation

(EP-107) Design and Development of Caregiver App to Support Client’s Self-Care Management Program

Presenter(s)

• AS

  Agus Setiawan

  Graduate Student Researcher
  University of Pittsburgh

  Participants should be aware of the following financial/non-financial relationship:
  Nothing to disclose

Co-Author(s)

• ZA

  Zakiy Alfikri

  Graduate Student Researcher
  University of Pittsburgh

  Participants should be aware of the following financial/non-financial relationship:
  Nothing to disclose

Objectives
1. Participants will learn caregiver’s perspective in using mHealth to provide support for the clients.
2. Participants will learn the requirements of the caregiver app identified from caregiver’s insight.
3. Participants will learn the result of incorporating the requirements into the design of the caregiver app.


Methods
mHealth system is a potential solution to deliver self-care programs for managing chronic conditions. However, individual with chronic conditions may experience treatment fatigue, inconsistent execution of complex self-care that challenges long-term adherence to self-care management. Involvement of the family as well as peer support has been viewed as an important factor in supporting clients to maintain adherence to self-care management tasks throughout their lives. Six focus groups were conducted to investigate the needs of caregiver in caring their client using mHealth. These focus groups invited caregiver of clients with Brain and Spinal Anomalies. The result were translated into design through iterative sessions. Two sessions were conducted: focusing on initial design of the mHealth system and gaining feedback and refining the design. Afterward, the final design was implemented in a caregiver app prototype that can be used by caregivers or family members of client with complex and chronic condition.

Results
It is identified from the focus groups that caregivers feel the need of tool to monitor the client’s adherence to his/her self-care regimens. The caregivers also want to have the capability to provide feedback or motivational response for his/her adherence-related achievement. They also feel the need of having educational resources related to the client’s health condition. Based on the needs of the caregivers, we designed and developed caregiver app prototype. It consists of client’s adherence dashboard, simple feedback mechanism, predefined motivational message, and personalized education material. This app is integrated in iMHere (interactive Mobile Health and Rehabilitation) system that has mHealth app for client that can provide client’s adherence data and has the ability to receive feedback from the caregivers.

Conclusion
From the focus groups, we were able to capture caregiver’s perspective about mHealth that can benefit them in relation to giving support to their clients self-care management program. The result was successfully translated into the design and implementation of caregiver app. Usability study needs to be conducted to evaluate the prototype in order to make it better.