Today I met with Gustavo, Aehong, and Dr. Shih to talk about what our roles will be in this research project and what we could each start working on over the course of today and the weekend.

Aehong is working on recruiting people to interview — she has four confirmed right now and a goal of reaching 15 people. I am a member of a couple of Facebook groups for adult siblings of disabled people, many of whom are caregivers for their family members, so on Tuesday I’ll try to remember bringing up that connection as a way to potentially find more contacts who could point us to respite care providers and families caring specifically for older adults.

We also worked on elevator pitches for the project. This is my working pitch:

My name is Flannery Currin and I’m a rising senior at Earlham College studying computer science and psychology. I’m interested in doing research into technology that can help people with disabilities. This summer I’ll be working on a project that is trying to identify issues in the information sharing process faced by short-term respite care workers and design a product that can address those issues. Previous work has focused on assisting family caregivers and professional long-term caregivers, but unique challenges face those who come in temporarily to provide relief for primary caregivers. We will interview respite care workers and members of families that use respite care services to aid our project design. I hope that through this process, we will draw attention to these issues that fly under most people’s radars and that I will learn how to conduct similar types of studies in my future career.

I’ve started reading papers related to the project and will have summaries of them ready to post on Tuesday.