SilverBills: A Financial and Legal Tech Tool for Caregivers

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

ABSTRACT Financial and legal management for persons with dementia (PwD) is a crucial responsibility of caregivers. This responsibility adds to the stress and strain of caregiving. Current technology tools that help with bill management and budgeting often require a high degree of technical expertise and provide an insufficient degree of personal support to address the caregivers' needs. Current approaches to financial management are typically aimed at technologically savy millennials rather than caregivers. Additionally, these approaches do not address the need for safe and accessible storage of legal documents. Thus, the current solutions available for these tasks are a mismatch for caregivers. We will address the lack of effective financial management and legal support for caregivers of PwD by building features on our existing SilverBills (V1) product that simplify financial management, provide a supportive communication tool and a vault for critical legal documents. Using proprietary technology, SilverBills receives, scrutinizes, stores, and pays bills on behalf of clients. SilverBills intends to use this NIH grant to further develop its technology and tailor capabilities to specifically address the needs of caregivers. The goal of this project is to decrease the stress and strain on caregivers of PwD, by providing a simple, safe and effective financial and legal management tool. The objective of this Direct to Phase II SBIR proposal is to develop an application designed for caregivers to oversee the financial activities of PwD and quantitatively measure financial, emotional and physical wellbeing of caregivers. Our central hypothesis is that use of the proposed Silverbills V2 product will improve overall wellbeing in caregivers of PwD. We aim to build an easy to use, customizable, client facing application for caregivers to direct the financial activities of PwD. In addition, we will enhance the capabilities of the application to reconcile banking information, detect fraud, secure data, provide enhanced reporting capabilities and provide further budgeting and planning functionality. Finally, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Denver, we will assess caregiver burden and physical, financial, and emotional distress. The team supporting Silverbills V2 includes expertise in elder law, business development, Ruby on Rails software engineering, financial security and cognitive health, caregiving, research design and statistics. The work proposed in the Aims outlined above should demonstrate that the SilverBills V2 product will: 1) Provide a financial management tool which includes a messaging system and vault of critical documents for caregivers of PwD and/or older adults, and 2) Evaluate the effectiveness of our product to decrease caregiver stress and increase caregiver quality of life. This team will support the rigorous scientific validation which will potentially provide evidence of our innovation and support this critical work to provide technological tools for financial and legal management to caregivers of PwD.