Matthieu Tixier

Counting on the Group: Reconciling Online and Offline Social Support among Older Informal Caregivers

Awareness of the huge amount of work faced by relatives in caring for a person suffering from a loss of autonomy has led to research focusing on ways to ease the burden on informal caregivers. Among them, services and devices aimed at providing social support and fighting the isolation that may be caused by the caregiving tasks appear important. However, little is known about the social support informal caregivers actually value and look for in practice. To fill this gap, we conducted a multi-sited study, focusing on older informal caregivers, because they are numerous and have lower experience with technology. Our study highlights that being part of a group is a key element in helping informal caregivers to feel that they are not alone, continue leisure activities, learn from others and sustain participation in organized activities. Through this understanding, we discuss design opportunities in a sociotechnical approach complementing online and offline social support.

Looking for Respite and Support: Technological Opportunities for Spousal Caregivers

Our research aims at informing the design of technological solutions to alleviate the stress resulting from the involvement of spouses of Alzheimers disease patients as caregivers. For so doing, we have observed and analyzed the different offline solutions that are offered by a healthcare network in the Aube region (North-East of France). We discuss the key factors that we have identified for building an effective support network and identify five perspectives for the development of an online social support platform to lower the burden of spousal caregivers.

Designing interactive content with blind users for a perceptual supplementation system

With the spread of ICT and the Internet during the last two decades, more and more tools rely on graphical interfaces that make them scarcely accessible to the visually impaired. The ITOIP project aims at developing the use of a tactile perceptual supplementation system called Tactos. A partnership with a visually impaired persons (VIP) association allows us to conduct a participatory design approach intended to gather first community of users around our system. This article reports on the design approach we have implemented in order to develop usable and useful applications for VIP users. Through a rapid prototyping process we address the development of the use of our technology with blind users representatives. We present the interaction and use principles highlighted from the design of three Tactos applications: a tutorial, a street maps exploration system and a country level map application.

Practices Analysis and Digital Platform Design: An Interdisciplinary Study of Social Support

People are turning increasingly to the Internet to find support and share their experience and feelings when they are undergoing hardships such as medical problems. The aim of our ongoing research project is to design innovative online social support services. In order to pave the way for this complex undertaking, several interdisciplinary studies were conducted in this framework: discourse analysis was carried out on online discussions focusing on social support, observers attended support group meetings attended by family caregivers, and interviews were conducted with these caregivers. The application of our findings to our design project is discussed.

Touch through: experiencing remote touch across different modalities

This paper presents Touch Through (TT), an innovative smartphone application which provides an alternative way of experiencing interpersonal touch at a distance. Through the design of TT, we are interested in the issue of allowing people at a distance to share emotions and have a feeling of presence. The originality of our approach is to focus on the functional properties of touch highlighted by the study of sensory supplementation systems. TT transforms stimuli associated with touch into visual and/or auditory and/or vibratory sensations.

It is Not Because You Have Tools that You Must use Them: The Difficult Domestication of a Telemedicine Toolkit to Manage Emergencies in Nursing Homes

We conducted a retrospective study on the experimental deployment of a telemedicine toolkit in ten nursing homes. The purpose of the experiment was to see whether the use of these toolkits could allow for better cooperation between nursing homes and the local emergency medical dispatch center to avoid sending costly vehicles and having elderly people unnecessarily discharged at the hospital. We investigated the domestication process of these toolkits by nurses and orderlies from the nursing homes. Our findings show different levels of domestication: for some of the nursing homes, the lack of practical relevance of the toolkit in emergencies and the difficulty to borrow artifacts from doctors prevented complete adoption. For three nursing homes, domestication occurred in an unexpected way in the sense that the objective of the domestication changed. These findings led us to provide recommendations for projects aimed at improving inter-organizational cooperation through artifacts.