An innovative new digital product to provide carers support and confidence

The Challenge

There are around ten million voluntary caregivers in the UK, looking after a relative or friend in their home, and it’s increasing by thousands every week. There is a huge lack of practical and emotional support for them, and many feel stressed and alone. Often, due to a fragile social care system, they have no choice but to give their time and energy to care for someone who can no longer look after themselves, significantly impacting their own lives.

Carers often take on practical care (such as getting the person dressed or giving medication) as well as emotional, household and administrative tasks. Most are aged 45 to 65, looking after someone over 65. They have to develop an extensive and changing skill set.

They need help understanding tasks such as feeding, washing, grooming and bathroom functions but this is often not quick or easy to find, especially when dealing with an urgent care situation. The care sector is decentralised and information provided by charities and other organisations is fragmented, not personalised and insufficient to cover all carers’ needs.

This leaves them without guidance and support, and adds to the stress they're under. For some people, this stress becomes a health risk, both for themselves and the person they care for.

The vision

Dr Caroline Green saw a need for a digital product that gives carers the fast and easy support they can’t get from a decentralised system. Her research showed that carers want reliable, highly accessible round-the-clock information that is personalised, practical, easy to use, includes emotional support – and that they can trust. Her vision is to give carers the confidence to handle caring tasks, whenever and wherever they need help.

Dr Green is a post-doctoral fellow at King's College London’s National Institute for Health & Care Research as well as Research Fellow at Reuben College, University of Oxford. Her work focuses on AI and its potential to support older people and family carers, as well as the human rights and ethical implications of AI on caregiving.

She wanted this new product concept to connect carers with advice and knowledge from trusted organisations, use AI to provide tailored answers, and help to fill the gap in out-of-hours support. Dedicate will help carers feel calm and hopeful about their current situation, give them help and support in the moment, and show that there are people and organisations who can help them further.

Dr Green received part funding through UKRI’s Healthy Ageing Accelerator and engaged with Studiomade to design and build the digital product for beta launch based on our expertise within healthcare, and new venture creation.

What we did

We created a product MVP for an AI-powered 24/7 virtual care partner platform. We were conscious throughout the design and build process of two primary considerations. One was flexible and dynamic content, using an AI chatbot to provide carers immediate help and guidance that is as practical and personalised to them as possible. The second was designing an empathetic, safe space where users arrive and instantly feel reassured, understood and supported.

UI and UX

Our design team’s main objectives were that the digital experience feels like a calm and safe place, where it’s easy to get help with specific problems.

We esthablished a brand approach for this venture and product that used warm and calming colours and gradients, to evoke the core values of care and empathy. Subtly moving shapes in orange, pink and yellow suggest the feeling of a beautiful sunset, transitioning to a calming, complementary palette.

We knew from Dr Green that some users were sceptical about an AI chatbot experience and that if this was the main focus it would put them off. We designed the UI and product flow so that the qeury did not feel like ‘chat bot and robotic interaction’. Principally, it’s easy to search and view results from across the Dedicate content library.

The technology

We built the product utilising React deployed on Netlify, leveraging Contentful as a headless CMS that allows the Dedicate team to create, manage and distribute content across multiple devices and channels. Search is powered through an Algolia whilst data is housed in Google Firebase with analytics by Google Analytics.

AI integration

We integrated AI within this product in a seamless manner utilising Botsonic. Our main consideration was to ensure that our AI model only utilised content specifically vetted by Dedicate. Our system (Chat GPT 4) learns only from content we've trained it on, sourced from the Dedicate team and their content partners.

Within the user experience, we have included suggestions for prompts and other key language that supports the user. This is to show carers that rather than just typing in a general term such as ‘better sleep’, as in a search bar, they can ask questions about their own situation (e.g. 'How can I help my father with demential to sleep better?) and get personalised answers.

Specialist content

Specialist, authoritative content for Dedicate has been created by expert healthcare providers including Sage House dementia support services, Dr Kellyn Lee from the Dementia Care Hub, and video content from HCI Digital, a producer of health and social care videos. As the knowledge base expands and the team see which topics matter most to users, they will create further content with care professionals and researchers.

Accessibility

Accessibility was a primary consideration and is why we have been rostered by the Design Age Institute as a specialist creative agency. For Dedicate, we have utilised Chakra UI as a basis for our front-end system as it's built with accessibility in mind. All authored components are compliant with WAI-ARIA accessible navigation standards (a set of HTML attributes that can be applied to elements to improve accessibility).

The outcome

We created an empathetic brand approach for Dedicate, and designed and built a Beta MVP that has been launched to a community of first adopters. This testing phase will give Dr Green and her team an audience base, and show them where carers most need support and what they find informative and useful.

As data on usage patterns and content engagement builds up, the team will use this to iterate on the product and build the case for further expansion, refinement and product building. With an expanded knowledge base, and demonstration that Dedicate can continue to evolve and build traction across multiple business models including individual carers and care organisation support we hope that Dedicate as a University of Oxford spin-out company can secure VC funding to help it scale.