Week 4 (9/28–10/02): Peer Reviews & Contacting for Research

Based on our conversation with Kristin, our team was able to narrow down our problem space, context, and audience further. The case study that Deepan and Gretchen shared last week was compelling to our group, and it inspired us to look more closely in the relationships patients may have with their caregivers. Because we decided to focus on the relationship between patients and caregivers, we narrowed our audience down to the elderly patients, who are more likely to be accompanied by a caregiver at a doctor’s appointment. Because all of us are not in Pittsburgh and are in our home towns, we decided to contact local senior living homes to acquire research participants. Each one of us contacted ~4 different centers.

Peer Review

The peer review on Thursday was very insightful and helpful to us, mainly, because the majority of the breakout room were focusing on waiting rooms. Being able to present our research and the audience we had in mind and compare to other team’s ideas was refreshing, and helped us push ourselves to contact various people.

After presenting, we were able to gain insight from Nick and his interview with his grandparent. He mentioned pain points that were similar to what we found in our secondary research and personas.

Interview Questions

To gain more insight into patient and caregiver experiences, we each reached out to local organizations and communities for interviews. For the purpose of our project, we hope to gain insight from organizations, patients, and caregivers. For organizations, we hope to learn more about the system of caregiving and supporting low vision individuals from a high level. For patients, we are interested in hearing more about personal stories about their appointment experiences and relationships with their caregivers. For the caregivers, we are interested in hearing about their perspective and understanding of their patients’ needs.

We are currently waiting for responses, but these are a few questions we would like to ask:

Interview Questions for Organizations

• How many of your members have visual impairments?
• Do you have a system in place for providing caregivers for members?
  Are caregivers usually hired, or are they volunteers?
  Do caregivers need any background checks or training?
• Is there any in-house medical care, or do members usually visit hospitals/care centers in the area? If the latter, what systems are there in place to assist with transportation?

Interview Questions for Patients

• Do you have a caregiver?
  What is your relationship with your caregiver?
  What role does your caregiver have in your life?
  Do you ever feel like a burden to your caregiver, or does your caregiver ever make you feel like a burden? Why and how?
• What type of visual impairment(s) do you have?
  Do you feel like your caregiver understands your visual impairment(s)?
• Walk us through your experience when you go to a doctor’s appointment.
  What are the steps you go through?
  Who are you with and who do you interact with?
  What emotions do you feel before, during, and after your appointment?
• When you go to clinics for appointments, is there an approximate time you wait?
  How do you feel when in the waiting room? What is your experience?

Interview Questions for Caregivers

• What is your relationship with the person you’re caring for?
• What role does your patient have in your life?
• Do you ever feel like your patient is a burden? Why and how?
• Does your patient have any visual impairments?
  Do you feel like you understand your patients visual impairments?

As we receive responses and have conversations, we hope to iterate on these questions to ensure that we are using respectful language. We also wonder if some of these questions could be translated through our participatory design methods. Is there a way that participants can answer our questions and express their thoughts in a more loosely structured and hands-on method?

Next Steps

List of people/organizations we’ve reached out to (waiting on responses):

• Georgia:
  Atria North Point — got contact information of the Activities Director
  Legacy Ridge at Alpharetta
  The Mansions at Alpharetta Assisted Living and Memory Care
  Celebration Village Forsyth
  Addington Place Senior Living
• Bay Area:
  Caring Hearts Senior Care
  Homecare California
  Lincoln Glen
  Carlton Senior Living
• Texas:
  Coppell Lions Club — volunteer organization
  Coppell Senior center
  Envision Dallas