| When caring for premature infants, families can be overwhelmed by the dual responsibilities of providing care for their fragile infants while continually tracking health information. Ubiquitous computing technologies can assist families of premature infants in these efforts and reduce associated stress and anxiety. In this thesis, I present results from a qualitative study to understand the needs of both families and health professionals caring for premature infants. These results demonstrate barriers to current record-keeping practices and opportunities for ubiquitous computing systems to improve these practices. Based on these results, I present design guidelines for developing capture and access tools to facilitate the gathering, maintaining, and sharing of daily health information about premature infants. These principles include allowing for easy collection and interpretation of data, fitting record-keeping into everyday life and clinical workflow, and to support parental health and well-being. To demonstrate how these design guidelines might be met in practice, I designed and developed Estrellita. |
