CareJournal: A Voice-Based Conversational Agent for Supporting Care Communications

Document Title

CareJournal: A Voice-Based Conversational Agent for Supporting Care Communications

Document Information

• Subject Area: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Social Computing—Exploring the role of technology in fostering emotional communication within informal caregiving relationships
• Keywords: caregiving, older adults, conversational scaffolding, self-disclosure, voice assistant, evaluative disclosure, caregiving relationships

Research Background and Problem

• Identified Issues or Challenges: Effective communication between older care recipients and informal caregivers presents challenges. Caregivers face emotional burdens, while care recipients worry about emotional fluctuations and loss of autonomy. Traditional technology solutions focused on health monitoring may lead to depersonalized caregiving and exacerbate relational tensions.
• Significance: Caregiving is rooted in cooperative relationships. Imbalanced communication can impact the well-being of both parties, making optimized communication crucial.
• Research Motivation and Related Work: Current technologies often prioritize health status monitoring, which critics argue oversimplifies caregiving relationships. The research aims to explore how technology can assist in maintaining caregiving partnerships through improved communication practices, rather than replacing emotional connection and collaboration.

Solution

• Proposed Solution: This paper designs and evaluates a voice-based conversational agent system—CareJournal. The system aims to help caregiving stakeholders reflect on caregiving experiences and disclose opinions through guided question structures.
• Innovations:
  • Advocates for "conversational scaffolding" to support balanced communication within caregiving partnerships.
  • Provides space for both positive and negative feedback exchange.
  • Allows users to control whether to share their reflections, ensuring autonomy.
• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:
  • The research team developed a series of design principles, such as concise and clear questions and options to skip questions.
  • The prototype was developed using the VoiceFlow platform, enabling evaluative self-disclosure through a voice interface.
  • The study was conducted in two phases: a diary study (2 weeks) and prototype user interview evaluations.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:
  • The diary study revealed that caregivers tend to seek positive emotional connections in communication, while care recipients expressed concerns about emotional fluctuations and loss of autonomy.
  • Prototype evaluations showed that designs closely aligned with care recipients' needs helped alleviate communication challenges, particularly in distant relationships, facilitating feedback exchange and reassessment of caregiving details.
• Advantages:
  • Adapts to emotional needs in close relationships (e.g., enhancing opportunities for reflection).
  • Provides structured self-expression and feedback opportunities in distant or power-imbalanced relationships.
  • Supports dynamic and multidimensional caregiving relationships based on the study's "distance" framework.
• Experimental or Evaluation Results:
  • The prototype tool was deemed more beneficial for reflection and feedback transmission among caregiving parties, especially in handling distant relationships (e.g., parent-adult child relationships or friend caregiving relationships).
  • User responses to the technology varied significantly depending on the type of relationship and dimensions of distance.
• Limitations and Future Directions:
  • The current sample primarily focuses on geographically close caregiving relationships, potentially not fully covering diverse caregiving needs.
  • Study participants were generally familiar with technology, possibly excluding groups with lower technological acceptance.
  • Future work should include long-distance caregiving relationships, cross-cultural caregiving communication studies, and low-tech solutions.

In summary, this paper demonstrates how technology can support the complex dynamics of communication practices within caregiving relationships, while emphasizing that technology design should consider the emotional and relational tensions between care recipients and providers in specific contexts.