Opportunities to support parents in managing their children's health

Abstract

Parents always desire to take good care of their children and manage their numerous responsibilities. One of parents' main responsibilities is to manage their children's health. Through their actions of caring for their children, parents want to know they're doing the best job to ensure their children's well being. Unfortunately, much of the time this responsibility is a challenge-particularly for busy, dual-income parents-because it involves the collection, organization, retrieval, and transfer of information between many people in many different contexts. In our user research with dual-income parents they shared their experiences of forgetting to give medication, and of both not having an easy way of recording information and not having the information they needed when communicating with childcare and healthcare providers. Smart home technology appears to offer a promise to easy this situation for parents; however, the HCI community has only investigated healthcare in the home with a focus on elders. To better understand this opportunity area we conducted a user-centered design project looking at the management of children's by their parents.