Digital Support Requirements for the Care Community QuartierPflege

Abstract: The integration of informal caregiving into everyday life can lead to burdens that negatively affect health and psychological well-being of family caregivers. Care communities consisting of a dynamic network of informal and professional actors can offer a solution to reduce family caregiver burden. Close cooperation in such care communities gives rise to the immediate need for efficient coordination tools including digital support. Existing Apps for family caregivers do not always provide sufficient support to improve health and quality of life. Currently, there is no App holistically supporting daily work in care communities consisting of informal and professional actors. To fill this gap, specific App requirements for coordinating daily work in such care communities were identified in a user-centric approach. Therefore, structured personal interviews were conducted with N = 16 potential actors of care communities. Audio-recorded interviews were literally transcribed and analyzed in MaxQDA by structured qualitative content analysis. App requirements were divided into four major categories: operational planning (e.g., submission of care needs, handover books, calendar, synchronization of family caregivers’ and care recipients’ profiles), information (e.g., an information section per care recipient), communication (e.g., internal chat, speech-to-text-function) and human resources (e.g., administration of staff, working time and payment). In addition, privacy aspects (e.g., providing most important physical limitations of care recipients, but no medical diagnosis), usability and user experience (e.g., intuitive usage, logical structure, visually appealing design) as well as backend App requirements (e.g., implementation of different horizontal and vertical App permissions) were addressed. The target group of future App users could be wide with different roles in coordinating the daily work in care communities, which results in complex software requirements. Usability and user experience of a future App need to be evaluated with the target group. Furthermore, it should be evaluated whether digital support of care communities of informal and professional caregivers offers a holistic approach and a sustainable improvement of the quality of life and health of family caregivers.

Keywords: care community, informal caregiving, digital support requirements, user, centered app development, qualitative data, interviews, QuartierPflege

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1003665

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