CAREER: Co-designing a Service Exchange Model for Sustaining Community-based Respite Care

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This project will lead to a novel understanding of effective online service exchange mechanisms for facilitating respite care among underserved and vulnerable populations. Respite care can provide a chance for primary caregivers to take a break from their long-term caregiving work for sick or disabled family members, as well as encourage them to engage in workforce participation. Despite its beneficial aspects, there are barriers such as financial, technical, skill-based, and social inhibitions to receiving and providing respite care. This research will investigate the sociotechnical factors that are crucial for developing an affordable and accessible respite care service exchange platform that leverages the shared caregiving needs within a local community. Findings will result in the development of a service exchange platform that facilitates respite care service matching, coordination, and ongoing care support for people with disabilities and chronic conditions. The integrated research and education plan is to conduct social media outreach, revamp undergraduate and graduate level courses to promote awareness of gender disparities in caregiver burden, connect caregivers to community resources, provide respite care skill development, and offer online training and best practices guidelines on technology use, care management, and care transition.The study will advance the design of affordable and accessible community-based respite care service exchange platforms. Three sets of activities will contribute to our understanding of design and usage of sociotechnical systems that aim to facilitate respite care service exchanges, reciprocity, skill development, and access for participants with limited computer skills. First, the research will assess the barriers and facilitators that lead to community-based respite care, through interviews of care recipients, primary caregivers, secondary caregivers, and respite caregivers, followed by co-design workshops with these stakeholder groups. Second, a service exchange platform prototype will be developed to address the respite care needs in underserved and vulnerable communities, involving iterative user-centered design and usability testing. Third, a 12-week pilot study will evaluate the feasibility and preliminary effectiveness of the respite care service exchange platform on reducing caregiver burden, facilitating perceived trust, and improving care quality of patients, primary caregivers, and respite caregivers during caregiving and care transition. This study will provide preliminary evidence as to whether a community-based respite care network can have an impact on alleviating the persistent problem of caregiver burden.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.