Understanding Caregivers’ Needs
With funding from AGE-WELL, Canada’s technology and aging network, we are:
- deepening our understanding of the health, social and financial consequences family/friend caregivers experience
- assessing the potential for Assistive Technologies (AT) to meet family/friend caregivers’ needs, including compiling and evaluating existing AT products and services for family/friend caregivers (precedent-based analysis)
- understanding the Information and Communication Technology (digital literacy) skills of older workers and family/friend caregivers. ICT literacy and the role of assistive technology in helping older workers
- conducting a feasibility study to collect evidence about employers’ and their carer-employees’ experiences with and beliefs about how ATs can help them integrate, manage or balance paid work and care work roles. Connecting Working Caregivers Project Summary
- contributing to the development of Huddol, the first cross-disease, cross-platform, social health network that aims to help family and friend caregivers connect with each other and health care professionals
- contributing to the development of MatchWork, a cloud-based platform that powers employment service agencies helping hard-to-employ people by ensuring it meets the needs of older workers and family caregivers
- mobilizing knowledge by co-creating with older adults several illustrated short films that reflect a common problem older persons may experience and designed things as potential solutions
Transitions and Impact on Later Life (TRAILL)
With funding from the Kule Institute for Advanced Study (2016-2019), we:
- conceptualized family care trajectories across the life course
- tested the capacity of Canadian data to understand how family life course trajectories in caregiving affect older adults’ health, wealth and happiness and provided feedback to Statistics Canada on national caregiving surveys
- created empirically five family care trajectories across the life course.