CHI presentations

Some of the work my colleagues and I have been doing for the Growing Older, Staying Connected project will be presented at the CHI 2014 conference at the end of April. Our paper, "Captioned Photographs for Supporting Psychosocial Aged Care," examines how aged care managers used a purpose-built photo-sharing application to communicate with their clients, who all live independently at home. The work of aged care managers involves a lot of psychosocial care and support, rather than physical or medical care. In the past, technologies designed to support aged care in the home typically focused on supporting informal carers (i.e., families and friends) or medical care. Many existing technologies for aged care are designed primarily for health monitoring. Our work presents new opportunities for exploring the role social technologies can play in supporting psychosocial care in this setting. The paper also explores some of the challenges encountered when personal and visual forms of technology-mediated communication are used in the context of professional aged care.

Our work will also be represented at the CHI workshop on "Enabling Empathy in Health and Care: Design Methods and Challenges"