Family Resilience Technologies: Designing Collaborative Technologies for Caregiving Coordination in the Children's Hospital

Abstract

When a child is hospitalized with a serious illness like cancer, their families must process emotional stress, complicated medical information, and take on new caregiving tasks. Additionally, they must collaborate with each other while maintaining their existing employment and household chores. Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) technologies have the ability to enhance family care coordination. However, the challenges to family caregiving coordination in the hospital, particularly during prolonged hospitalizations, are not well studied. In this paper, I describe my proposal and research plan to study the role that collaborative technology can play in augmenting family care collaboration and family resilience during the extended hospitalization period.