An estimated 40 million U.S. adults act as caregivers in some capacity and provide over $500 billion in unpaid care. While adults ages 45 to 64 are most likely to be caregivers (23%), 17% of adults over 65 care for another aging adult. Many individuals in this group are caring for a spouse/partner or a friend/neighbor. Aging caregivers often provide healthcare needs, including coordinating doctors, managing medication, and overseeing nutrition requirements. There is an opportunity to support aging caregivers who may be coping with aging challenges of their own. Eight in ten Americans describe caregiving as their “new normal,” according to a 2017 Merrill Lynch study. There is a disconnect between care expectations and reality.
The Live Well Collaborative conducted primary and secondary research on how big the personal hygiene markets are for the caregiver and aging population and benchmarked current items used in a caregiving setting. During the research segment, the Live Well team found that personal hygiene is comprised of two markets: personal care and skin care. After interviewing, the team identified the two main pain points in the home that both caregivers and seniors need help with: the bedroom and the bathroom. These areas became the settings for the ideation phase.
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During ideation, the team focused on three persona relationships that the soon to be products and services would address. These relationships were based on statistics found from the annual AARP caregiving report found on their website. The report stated that the most common caregiver is a daughter taking care of a mother, a spouse taking care of a spouse, and a grandchild taking care of a grandparent. After more research and expert interaction, the Live Well Team decided to focus solely on care in the bathroom of a care recipient. Six different concepts were created for the bathroom setting. The Team also took a look at what the current conversation around aging is and how they can reconfigure the conversation to be more positive and uplifting for the aging consumer!
The team reduced the concepts down from six to four. The refined ideas were: Grip Glove, Grip Feet, Gait Shawl, and Finger Brush. These individual concepts are seen as a system of products and to help new caregivers who just started taking care of a loved one. The concepts were partnered with a brand name, packaging, online and in-store mock-ups.
Download Refinement PresentationIn 2018, COA provided 1.2 million hours of home care assistance, and the need is increasing as the population of older adults continues to rise with the aging of the baby boomers. Unfortunately, COA has seen a dramatic drop in service utilization due to an increasing shortage of home care assistants nationally. This means clients are going without essential home care assistance like bathing, dressing, light housekeeping, errands, and meal preparation. To fill the need for home care assistance, non-professional caregivers (mostly family members) need training in specific tasks. Live Well would like to test and develop their Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) capabilities by taking a multimedia approach to address nonprofessional caregiver training.
During the Research Phase, the Live Well team began the process of familiarizing themselves with what it means to be a family caregiver and gathering insights and statistics on the population group. From there, the team developed a persona matrix for both seniors and their caregivers. The Matrix framed different training opportunity spaces based on their potential pain points and needs. In parallel to the caregiver research, the team benchmarked different XR technologies and how they might best fit the project’s needs. The team also started to develop the necessary skills to create an experience in VR by learning the Unreal gaming software under the guidance of the faculty advisor Ming Tang.
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During the Ideation Phase, the Live Well team started to frame out and bucket all of the different caregiver training opportunities and the relevant XR technologies in Miro. The Live Well team then conducted an ideation exercise called Crazy Eights to quickly generate multiple ideas/sketches based on the opportunity spaces. From those quick sketches, the team refined them by creating more detailed storyboards and presented them to COA for feedback on their relevancy/benefits to their caregivers.
After receiving feedback, the team then created a prototype of a VR experience that demonstrated a training module and an empathy experience during the ideation report-out.
During the Refinement Phase, the Live Well team continued building the conversation guides and empathy experience to include new interactions, UX/UI graphics, levels, tutorials, dialogue, audio, characters, and animations. The new levels included a conversation and empathy experience for: hesitation to take medication, starting the conversation about incontinence, and talking down a hallucination.
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