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Project Topic
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It is known that depressive disorders have multiple consequences on the living comfort, performance, and physical health. The rate of depressive disorders is higher among family carers, so we can expect consequences for their performance and their health, as cognitive impairments, which may lead to inadequate assistance. In TOPIC, we aim at providing a solution to this problem by diminishing informal family carers’ burden, by then decreasing all the related problems, and offer them a better quality of life and independence. It will then reduce all the related costs of these “hidden patients”. The solution we offer to develop, the CarePortfolio, will provide multimodal social support to informal carers by means of a set of accessible online services, which would be available at all times via a portal, available on the Internet, via tablets, smart phones, and/or iTV. This set of services will cover the three dimensions of social support: informational, emotional, and tangible. Providing user-friendly and accessible portal to support informal carers emotionally and socially will alleviate their stress and increase their independency and the efficiency of their daily care giving tasks. In order to achieve our goal, our consortium combines partners being experts in all the needed domains: design for the elderly, online social support for family carers, iTV applications development, integrating online shops to provide self serving facilities in the Internet, information systems infrastructure, development of embedded applications at home, and of course three end-user organisations, strongly involved in family carers’ support. In addition, we have experts who focus on socio-technical measures, which communicate the project results in novel ways so that they reach the targeted end-users appropriately. Based on user requirements we will develop mock-ups, prototypes, and a final product called CarePortfolio, an open customisable system of services.
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