"I Go Beyond and Beyond" Examining the Invisible Work of Home Health Aides

Home health aides are paid professionals who provide long-term care to an expanding population of adults who need it. However, aides' work is often unrecognized by the broader caregiving team despite being in demand and crucial to care---an invisibility reinforced by ill-suited technological to...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the ACM on human-computer interaction 2023-04, Vol.7 (CSCW1), p.1-21, Article 59
Main Authors: Ming, Joy, Kuo, Elizabeth, Go, Katie, Tseng, Emily, Kallas, John, Vashistha, Aditya, Sterling, Madeline, Dell, Nicola
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Empirical studies in HCI
Human computer interaction (HCI)
Human-centered computing
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Summary:Home health aides are paid professionals who provide long-term care to an expanding population of adults who need it. However, aides' work is often unrecognized by the broader caregiving team despite being in demand and crucial to care---an invisibility reinforced by ill-suited technological tools. In order to understand the invisible work aides perform and its relationship to technology design, we interviewed 13 aides employed by home care agencies in New York City. These aides shared examples that demonstrated the intertwined nature of both types of invisible work (i.e., emotions- and systems-based) and expanded the sociological mechanisms of invisibility (i.e., sociocultural, sociolegal, sociospatial) to include the sociotechnical. Through these findings, we investigate the opportunities, tensions, and challenges that could inform the design of tools created for these important, but often overlooked, frontline caregivers.
ISSN:2573-0142
2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3579492