Unpaid carers provide non-medical care to people who suffer long-term diseases or disabilities. This role is highly demanding and time consuming, causing a multidimensional impact on the caregiver's life. In particular women are the most responsible for the majority of caregiving duties especially impacting women who are illiterate and from low-income status/population, increasing or contributing to gender inequalities. The effect of being an unpaid carer is a major social issue, affecting 6.8 million people in the UK, 43.5 million in the USA, and particularly high numbers in other LMICs with limited reported data. Due to the complexity of caregiving tasks, unpaid carers present high levels of financial and emotional stress, depressive symptoms, and poor physical health. Digital technologies bring the opportunity to support unpaid carers' wellbeing.
The project aims to understand interaction modalities with technology to increase effective caregiver’s wellbeing support as a minority underrepresented group. This project will help to collect information that unpaid carers already generate when they use technology (e.g., their mobile phone use – if they have it – can be a source of data; the information shared through social network sites). This will help to understand how technology can be better designed to support carers' burnout without increasing workload. We want to investigate how burnout is currently tracked using technology (mobile, tangible, ambient or SSNs as Facebook, Twitter, or similar where support groups spaces are used as spaces of mutual support), create comparative cases on different unpaid carers and the impact of digital literacy level.
It will follow a user-centred design approach, to understand the unpaid care context identifying appropriate technologies for each case. Using design ethnography, the information collected will support prototype design and deployment of tools to evaluate with unpaid carers.
This project will allow it to define specific areas to cover related to the unpaid care context, particularly on:
· Follow a user-centred design approach to understand the unpaid care context and identify the technological practices, digital literacy levels and burnout/isolation levels of unpaid carers in the UK.
· Identify the most suitable interaction modalities according unpaid carers situations to promote resilience and wellbeing.
· Apply design ethnography for eliciting information that will support the design, prototype and deployment of tools and Emerging Technologies that support unpaid carers wellbeing
· Evaluate socio-technical prototypes designed with unpaid carers and member of their support networks.
For more information about the project, please contact [Email Address Removed]
Academic criteria: A 2:1 Honours undergraduate degree or a master's degree, in computing or a related subject. Applicants with appropriate professional experience are also considered. Degree-level mathematics (or equivalent) is required for research in some project areas.
Applicants for whom English is not their first language must demonstrate proficiency by obtaining an IELTS score of at least 6.5 overall, with a minimum of 6.0 in each skills component.
Application Information: If you would like to be considered for the School Funded Application, please submit your application before the 30th June 2021.
In the funding field of your application, insert “I am applying for 2021 PhD Scholarship in Computer Science and Informatics”, and specify the project title and supervisors of this project in the text box provided.
Apply online: https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research/programmes/programme/computer-science-and-informatics - Please read the "How to apply" instructions carefully prior to application.
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