Development of this repo was inspired by the Datavant Hackathon
My family opened up Continual Care when we needed home care services that were unavailable to us unless we had 4hrs of work at least 4 days a week. The 'uber of caregiving' did not yet exist, and neither were home care agencies empowered to serve individuals suffering from any form of dementia who needed care continually as opposed to continuously.
The difference between the two: continually means there are pauses; continuously implies there are not. And dementia progresses continually, not continuously.
We opened up Continual Care to give our family and the world a better way to give care, and giving back is the cause we rally behind as we continue to cultivate joy in the lives of the individuals and families that we serve.
Read more about our giving at https://continualcare.org
DX/DI (Data Experience/Data Interfaces) is a research into how data is experienced and consumed, and our innovation in patient experience is in the collection and consumption of higher-resolution diagnostic analytics: Activities of Daily Living (ADLs).
Our app empowers caregivers and families to collect and consume ADL's; the quantitative metric in which healthcare professionals use in order to diagnose and treat dementia.
Simply by surfacing and collecting more resolute ADL's, we have fostered the trust necessary to develop a platform for unprecedented caregiving, and only with these diagnostic analytics in place can we develop a prescriptive analytic model for early detection and treatment of all forms of dementia.
At the end of it all, we have empowered our caregivers and families with an understanding that can cultivate more joy in their lives.
Our DX/DI research began with a Notion prototype. We instructed our caregivers to collect ADL information and had them input it into a database that we shared with the families of the individuals that we served.
And these are some of the things they had to say:
Lavona ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5/5 As a registered nurse, I fully endorse Continual Care. Continual care has provided a great aide for my mom. Our Aide is kind caring, and a responsive caregiver who is ... Continual Care provided daily write ups so I can go on my mom’s page and see how her day went. If there are any concerns or issues with mom they contact us immediately ...
Aaron ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 5/5 The culture at Continual Care is one that loves the soul of the person while nurturing for the body. They look beyond the faults and locations and somehow see the good no matter what the current condition. This is a quality that cannot be taught but only recognized and encouraged.
Full reviews on Caring.com
**From this we knew that we could cultivate joy through improving the DX **
Families were ecstatic to see the day-to-day, and we knew what was next - developing our own app. And so over the past few days, we designed and developed a cross-platform mobile app for this hackathon using Figma, Flutter, and Google Cloud.
We built three features - an activity overview, a daily log overview, and a log-capture flow - to demonstrate the impact of well-crafted DX/DI. The way this information is experienced and the interfaces in which it is collected is paramount in improving the experience of the individuals that we serve and the families which support them.
Through our research into the experience and interfaces of dementia data, we have cultivated joy in peoples lives while simultaneously developing the analytic foundation for powerful models in early dementia detection and treatment.
Going from zero-to-one is always the biggest hurdle and that's no exception here. Sometimes all the specific paddings on the design would become so laborious, or a simple bug in the domain-transform layer would hold us up and we began to wonder 'What is the point of this?', or 'Will this even make an impact?'
Giving back is why we kept going - we knew giving our abilities towards this app could truly cultivate joy - and we knew that if we accomplish the task of building this platform we could cultivate even more.
Pride is a trap; although we can't help but feel a little bit when we look at the culmination of our work. To some it may seem that all we built was a social healthcare app but we know this simple app can have a profound impact on the everyday lives of those who suffer with dementia and the families and caregivers who give it all to care for them.
We found a renewed vigor in our purpose, the 'why' we are doing this, that can help us overcome any obstacle.
An alpha release internally so we can continue DX/DI research.