Our deliverables at the end of week 10 will definitely include an analysis of the interviews we conducted with family caregivers, respite care workers, and workers in long-term caregiving facilities and hopefully include a prototype design for a web/mobile application to facilitate communication between family caregivers and respite care workers. The analysis of the interviews will include all parties’ current use of technology and their attitudes toward technology, as well as issues experienced in the respite care process due to a lack of effective communication. This will result in us being able to at the very least identify implications for design, even if we are not able to pull together a working prototype design by the end of the program.

However, at the moment, things look promising. Last Friday, we printed out the transcripts of our first three interviews and independently went through and highlighted the pieces we thought were relevant to our current investigation. This week, we met to discuss our findings and see if we could reach agreement on what pieces of the first interview were relevant and then start sorting those pieces by theme to identify codes to use for the rest of the analysis. We’ve been practicing with Dedoose, so transferring that information over should go relatively quickly and then we should be done with the paper version of analysis.

On Tuesday morning, the REUs all helped with a Mini University workshop where older adults learned how to make paper circuits. During that workshop, Aehong messaged us saying that 4 new participants had signed up basically overnight. We’re now working on scheduling the last of those and have around 10 participants who have signed up. We will continue trying to recruit respite care workers since we have more family caregivers signed up, but this should be enough if we aren’t able to get more participants. This means making a slight adjustment to our timeline, but since we’ve already begun the analysis process, it doesn’t throw us off schedule.

Last week, I met with Gustavo and Aehong to talk about authorship. Aehong said that she and Patrick plan to list the two of us on whatever paper results from the work we do during this 10-week period. We also all agreed that Aehong should be listed as an author on our REU paper, but listing Patrick depends on where we plan to submit it. If we take his suggestion of submitting it to the Student Design Competition at CHI, all authors are required to be students. If we submit our paper somewhere else, though, we could decide to list him as well. Our meetings this week have been tricky to schedule, but productive overall.