Design and Implementation of Technologies to Support Older Adult-Caregiver Dyads

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As the population ages, a new type of digital user emerges: the caregiver proxy. Caregivers are people who help older adults with daily living, including social activities, health and wellness, shopping, banking, and accessing social services. Caregiver proxies often access eService portals on behalf of the older adults they help. Proxy use of such portals can create a wide variety of serious security and privacy problems, and can also be problematic for providers interacting at the other end of these systems (such as government workers, healthcare providers, bank officers, etc.). The long term goal of my research program is to design and evaluate technologies that will allow older adults and their caregivers to use new technologies together in a way that supports these complex and dynamic relationships, in which the level of dependency on caregivers fluctuates over time and varies according to the context. These complex relationships need to be acknowledged and supported by emerging smart-home technologies, companion robots, mobile apps, and eService portals. In the next five years, my focus will be on designing technologies (system architectures, interaction techniques and privacy configuration interfaces) to support older adults and caregivers engaging with eService portals. Our eService society requires increasing technological sophistication of users in order to participate in banking, healthcare, education, and to access social services. When older adults need to create accounts and manage their privacy and security, they often partially or fully delegate this digital interaction to various caregivers, who may be spouses, adult children, friends, or neighbors. I will model older adult-caregiver relationships to create design tools (such as dyadic personas) and access technologies that acknowledge and support the complexity of these relationships. I will implement an eService architecture to work across domains, have interaction techniques that take into account cognitive decline and disabilities, provide access transparency and safety checks to detect elder-abuse, and allow privacy-preserving information access controls. HQP working on these projects will gain skills in human-centered iterative design, including need-finding, rapid and interactive prototyping, interactive systems implementation, and formal usability studies and other evaluation methods. Outcomes of this work include models of older-adult caregiver dyads, understanding of caregiver technology use, a generalized eService access model for caregiver proxies, design tools, and a set of default privacy settings that reflect common older adult-caregiver communication sharing patterns. The impact will be companies and government agencies designing more secure and robust eService portals that explicitly acknowledge and support caregiver proxies. Proxies will be able to use eService portals in ways that respect older adults' information sharing preferences.