"It Felt Like I Was Left in the Dark": Exploring Information Needs and Design Opportunities for Family Caregivers of Older Adult Patients in Critical Care Settings

TL;DR

This paper explores the information needs of ICU caregivers for older adults, identifying challenges and proposing an AI system with visualization and chatbot features to improve information access and understanding.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI system prototype with visualization and chatbot functionalities tailored for ICU caregivers of older adults, based on formative interviews.

Findings

Caregivers face challenges in accessing and understanding medical information.

The proposed AI system improves information visualization and support.

Caregivers found the prototype helpful in understanding patient medical events.

Abstract

Older adult patients constitute a rapidly growing subgroup of Intensive Care Unit (ICU) patients. In these situations, their family caregivers are expected to represent the unconscious patients to access and interpret patients' medical information. However, caregivers currently have to rely on overloaded clinicians for information updates and typically lack the health literacy to understand complex medical information. Our project aims to explore the information needs of caregivers of ICU older adult patients, from which we can propose design opportunities to guide future AI systems. The project begins with formative interviews with 11 caregivers to identify their challenges in accessing and interpreting medical information; From these findings, we then synthesize design requirements and propose an AI system prototype to cope with caregivers' challenges. The system prototype has two key features: a timeline visualization to show the AI extracted and summarized older adult patients' key medical events; and an LLM-based chatbot to provide context-aware informational support. We conclude our paper by reporting on the follow-up user evaluation of the system and discussing future AI-based systems for ICU caregivers of older adults.