Supporting carers in their caring role through design

Carers are people who look after family, partners or friends who could not manage without them because of frailness, illness or disability. Our contribution is to show the potential for design to support carers in their vital caring role, focusing on health information sharing. We describe why it is important to recognise and consider carers in the design of home health monitoring technology, and why it is important to help carers maintain their health and well being. We present design guidelines for home monitoring technology. These guidelines are distilled from a survey distributed to carers in a rural part of Scotland on health information sharing. We used these guidelines to design a new home monitoring system called @Hand. The main difference with current systems is the focus on facilitating information sharing between cared-for and carer rather than cared-for and health professional.