Virtual Reality for Caregiver Assembly, Relief, Empowerment, and Support (VR-CARES)

The VR-CARES project is an innovative, collaborative effort that invites dementia care professionals into the design process of a virtual reality platform seeking to mitigate their work-related burden and social isolation by cultivating a virtual community of support. The co-created, caregiver-specific VR platform will serve as a safe, communal space where caregivers can remotely connect with their peers, share fun experiences together, access support, learn self-care and build resilience within a supportive virtual network to enhance their social and mental health and job satisfaction. Central to VR-CARES in the principle of user-led innovation, ensuring that the technology not only serves but is informed and successfully adopted by the very individuals it intends to benefit, an important standard for empathetic and inclusive technology in healthcare.

The escalating demand for home-based caregiving, combined with a high turnover rate and prevalence of stress and burden in this workforce, presents a unique challenge within the healthcare sector. High turnover rates are especially difficult for care recipients with dementia who benefit from consistency. Caregivers are often socially isolated at work due to the intimate care they provide to socially isolated clients. The VR-CARES initiative is an innovative response to these issues built upon Rendever's existing social engagement VR platform and vast content to provide a novel caregiver support virtual reality (VR) platform for dementia caregivers providing in-home care that generates real community and connectivity. Rendever, a pioneer in VR for older adults, enables shared experiences with networked communication technology that overcomes geographical distance, lack of transportation, mobility issues, low vision, or cognitive impairment so they can connect with others for group travel, activities, games, and sharing life stories. Study Design. The proposed 3-aim project takes a human-centered design approach grounded in an in-depth qualitative understanding of the target population with multiple stages of user feedback to inform an iteratively developed VR platform to support home care workers and to test the feasibility of the resulting VR Caregiver platform with them. The investigators refer to this project as "VR Cares: Virtual Reality for Caregiver Assembly, Relief, Empowerment, and Support to improve social connection, health, and at-home dementia care" (VR CARES). The process followed has been summarized by the IDEAS framework and the Stanford d.school as encompassing 5 phases: "empathize" (understand target population), "define" (identify goals and scope), "ideate" (brainstorm potential solutions), "prototype" (build potential solutions), and "test" (gather feedback from target users). Participants. The investigators will recruit dementia caregivers (n=30) in the greater Detroit area to participate in pre/post-focus groups/interviews and up to 16 weeks of product use. The investigators will recruit caregivers who are employed by Right at Home, a nationwide in-home care provider well aligned with the mission of this study demonstrated by their Care Appreciation Program for caregivers and their sector dedicated to dementia care. While Right at Home does not ask their caregivers' race or ethnicity, or maintain records of such, an average of 90% of their caregivers are female and the other demographics of their caregivers also appear to accurately reflect the general care worker population. Demographics will be gathered during the screening process to help ensure our study represents the general population of direct care workers with roughly 34% White, 26% Hispanic, 26% Black, and 14% Non-Hispanic Other racial identification. Direct care workers will be at least 18 years of age, proficient in English, and provide care for at least one olde Покажи пълното описание...

Inclusion Criteria: * Employed by Right at Home and have at least one older adult client with Mild Cognitive Impairment or Alzheimer's Disease or Related Dementia * At least 18 years of age * Are proficient in English Exclusion Criteria: * History of seizures, severe vertigo or motion sickness * Are unable to see images in the virtual reality headset