Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Family caregivers, such as people who are caring for their aging spouses or parents, are providing over $26 billion worth of home caregiving services in Canada. In healthcare systems with few caregiver supports, this valuable but demanding work can lead to caregivers feeling unsupported and burned out. Smartphones may help provide accessible support services for caregivers, protecting them from burnout. A cohesive summary of all of the available studies relating to caregivers' uses of smartphones can provide a better understanding of smartphones' overall potential to support caregivers than any single study can. Therefore, the goal of this research was to systematically search for and summarize all available previous studies conducted relating to caregiving smartphone services. Two library databases have been systematically searched thus far for all possible studies relating to caregivers and smartphones. We screened the results for the appropriate studies, and we summarized all of these studies by searching for common themes across the studies. From the thousands of references retrieved, 24 papers were analyzed for these initial results. The themes we found were as follows: acceptance of smartphone services; accessibility of smartphone services; barriers and differences in services use; usability, efficacy, and feasibility of smartphone services; smartphone service design features; and content and uses of smartphone services for caregiving. The broad accessibility of smartphones among caregivers corresponds with national statistics on smartphone access and use. This review suggests that smartphone services to support caregivers show promise for being feasible services to launch. These initial results also suggest that caregivers want smartphone services to be developed for them. Our future work will search several more library databases in order to further develop these conclusions.