🧑🤝🧑Ability Hub App
Social and community care, as it should be.
Caregivers provide necessary support to someone, anyone who, due to age, illness, disability, or some other factor, cannot care for themselves. Caregiving may involve shopping, housekeeping, providing transportation, feeding, bathing, toilet assistance, dressing, walking, coordinating appointments and medical treatments, or managing a person’s finances.
Caregivers can be spouses, partners, adult children, parents, other relatives (siblings, aunts, nieces/nephews, in-laws, grandchildren), friends, or neighbors. Whatever your relationship with the person you’re caring for, you must add the title caregiver to the list of things you are. Without identifying yourself as a caregiver, you won’t know how to search for resources to help you navigate this new role.
SERVICES TO INDIVIDUAL CAREGIVERS
Supporting this growing population of caregivers requires an organized, coordinated array of well-designed individual services throughout the caregiving journey. These supportive services may be provided for caregivers only or for the caregiver and the person with disabilities.
Examples include:
Caregiver education and skills training.
Home health or personal care services, as well as home modification programs.
Adult daycare and respite care.
Peer support groups and opportunities to learn and socialize.
Transportation services.
Apps for caregivers and people living with dementia and GPS tracking devices.
Online support, information, and referral centers.
Search for Care
You will want to explore many choices if you decide to hire a private caregiver. Also, it will be important to acknowledge and include the desires of the person receiving care.
Consider the following questions in your search for appropriate care:
What services would be needed from the caregiver? (Try writing a job description outlining exactly what would be expected of a caregiver.)
Is the individual employed by an agency or organization licensed by the state?
What specific services will the caregiver provide? Do these services match your job description?
Will the patient's insurance, such as Medicaid or Medicare, pay for the service? If not, decide exactly how services will be paid.
What are the qualifications of the person or people giving care?
Will the same person or people always be available? Or will it be necessary to adjust to many different caregivers?
Does the agency or organization offer flexibility? Will Care be available on weekends, at night, and on holidays, for example? Does the agency offer respite care to support family caregivers as needed?
How does the agency or organization make sure that its employees treat their patients and patient families with respect?
CHALLENGES TO SERVICE DELIVERY
For a variety of reasons, available services and supports are not fully utilized by all caregivers for people living with dementia. First, more than half of these caregivers have little or no knowledge of formal support services in the community. Second, fragmentation of services makes it difficult for caregivers to find the services they need. Finally, gaps exist in inequitable access to interventions, services, and support. Caregivers also are not able to fully leverage their family and social circle efficiently and this may be contributing to their own despair, burnout, and social, mental, and physical agonies.
The Ability Hub app is a single place to organize all your information, tasks, and communication about your patients, their families, and caregivers in one place.
While the Abilityhub app is FREE to download and use by everyone, you will be asked to create an account to keep your data and contacts, secure and private.
The Abilityhub app allows you to use your existing account from any of your favorite applications that you may already be using, including Apple, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft. You may also create a new account using your personal email as well.
The app will discover if you are using it for the first time.
The app will ask you for basic demographic information, to know more about you and your circle of care.
Some of this information is used to identify you and other details are used to provide a very individual experience that is designed for your unique situation.
The AbilityHub app is primarily designed for caregivers, but it allows you to add your patients (or clients) and allow them to use the app, as well. You may also designate (or add) family members, or others from your social circle.
Among the many use cases for the AbilityHub app, our key objective is to help caregivers have a more satisfying and fulfilling life. The AbilityHub app uses several measures to detect the well-being of the caregivers by periodically asking the caregiver certain well-targeted questions.
Ability Hub App
The Ability Hub app has a very familiar interface. If you have used any social app, be it Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, the ABilityHub app interface will be familiar to you. The app lets you define your circle of care, and help connect with them in a discrete, secure, and private way. The app interface can be divided into three distinct parts.
Header Section
This is the top area of your app that gives you access to manage your profile, manage your circle of care, and invite your family, friends, and contacts to join your circle. You can also create requests for help from your circle of care.
You may also choose your preferred language to interact with the application. The Ability Hub currently supports English, Spanish, and Gujarati languages to interact with the app.
Footer Section
The functionality in this section provides access to organizing your patient's medical history, documents, requests, and calendar. This functionality lets you organize all the information in an easy-to-manage yet still accessible manner. You may also see the status of your requests that you may have shared with your circle.
Main Section
The Ability Hub is a social app at its core. It lets you define your circle and communicate with them in familiar ways. The main section is very similar to your most familiar social app. It lets you share your status, thoughts, photos, and/or documents with your circle. The rest of the main section is presented as your timeline where the posts from contacts, including their responses to your requests for help will be displayed in chronological order.
The Ability Hub app lets you define more than one circle which may or may not be overlapping and lets you share the status, information, and even functionality in each circle in the main section. Refer to Circle of Care details below.
Circle of Care
A Care Circle is an informally created, often spontaneous group of people who come together in support of a person, cause, community, or event. In the Ability Hub world of care, you may assign various roles to people in your circle of care. While the roles align directly with the expectations and engagement expected in social settings, the app also uses various roles to customize the functionality and access to various parts of the app.
The Patient
The circle of care in our app revolves around a patient. The patient, client, or family member is someone whose welfare and quality of life is expected to be improved by providing appropriate social and mental support. Usually, a patient, if he or she has a phone and is capable of using the phone apps, is invited by a caregiver to establish a digital support group or circle of care for this person. However, a patient may also sign up and establish her own circle of care.
When a person directly downloads the app and signs up for the first time, they are assigned the role of a caregiver. A patient, however, can easily change her role as a 'Patient' and then subsequently invite other people in her group as either a caregiver or a contact.
Caregivers
A caregiver is a person who helps someone else with daily activities, such as bathing, eating, taking medicine, or running errands. Caregivers can be family members, friends, neighbors, social workers, health professionals, or members of the clergy. They can provide care in a variety of settings, including at home, in a hospital, or in other healthcare settings.
Caregiver burden is defined as the strain or load borne by a person who cares for a chronically ill, disabled, or elderly family member. Caregiver burden is related to the well-being of both the patient and caregiver; therefore, understanding the attributes associated with caregiver burden is important. The Ability Hub app is primarily aimed at the caregivers and provides them with tools to understand, measure, and then use social support to alleviate this burden thereby leading to enhanced quality of care to the patient.
A caregiver in the Ability Hub app is most likely expected to be the initiator of a new circle of care. A caregiver in the Ability Hub platform has access to several functionalities including inviting more people to join the circle, initiating requests for help on behalf of the patient, and in general acting as a medical or health proxy for the person being cared for.
Contacts
The best care is always provided by your friends, well-wishers, and even your neighbors. You can create a small, closed group that you can rely on to help contribute to supplement your effort, help provide respite care, or even simply share updates with them.
The people in the 'contact' role can be kept aware of your progress, may see your posts and also respond to your requests for occasional help. Either a patient himself, or a caregiver may invite someone to join the circle of care for a patient. You can invite a person to join the circle of care by specifying the patient, and the role the invitee is expected to play.
A circle of care will always have a patient, possibly one or more caregivers, and an optional group of contacts (none or more) that could be relied upon for various support.
The Ability Hub Functionality
The following sections describe the major functionality provided by the app.
User Profile
the The personal details about the current user and its role is stored and managed via the profile screens. A patient can only be part of a single circle of care, his own. A person may be a contact for several patients and could be part of multiple circles. A person could also be a contact for some patients, while a caregiver for others. A caregiver can have many patients, whose circle of care may be curated by a single user. The timelines for all such users will always indicate all circles that the current user is part of, by displaying the name of patient in that circle.
Requesting Respite
Respite care is a key component of countering burnout. The basic premise of our app is to provide a perfectly private way to request help in a dignified way from your circle of care. A request for help can be initiated from the icon at the top bar. The app allows you to make requests and provide enough information for your friends and family to respond appropriately. You can raise requests for running errands, rides, getting meals delivered, or simply asking for a break. If needed, you may also raise requests for either childcare or daycare.
Sometimes it is important to have a confirmed support by a certain date. While raising a request for help, you can also specify a validity period by which you want your report to be active.
Request for running errand
Raising a request for running an errand involves the date and time of request and for how long fulfilling this might take. The app allows the selection of the type of errands requested.
Request for a Ride
Raising a request for a ride involves the date and time of the request and how long the ride might take. The app allows the selection of the pickup and drop-off points requested. You can also specify if you need a return ride as well.
Requesting Meals
Raising a request for a meal involves the date and time of the request and a description of the meal. The app allows the selection of the pickup and drop-off points requested. You can also specify the number of meals requested.
Requesting Respite
Sometimes, as a caregiver, you only need a break. The app will let you request a break from your regular caregiving and have someone from your circle volunteer himself. Raising a request for respite care involves the date and time of the request and how long the support might be needed. The app allows the selection of the pickup and drop-off points requested.
Requesting Petcare help
Raising a request for pet care involves the date and time of the request and how long the session should last. The app allows you to specify the number and types of pets.
Requesting Childcare help
Raising a request for child care involves the date and time of the request and how long the session will last. The app allows you to specify the number and types of children who need to be supervised.
Sharing status
Your status is a message published online by a user on the app. A post can be your recent Instagram picture, a link to your blog post, or a simple comment. All in all, a post represents a piece of content that is published across your circle of care. A post on the Ability Hub app is a message, status update, photo, or video. Posts can also include links to other content.
Your posts will appear on the timeline of every member in your circle of care. Any member in your circle can like, comment, and share posts.
In some cases, certain actions like creating a request for help, or accepting a request will automatically generate a post.
Any user of the Ability Hub App can create a post from the top of the app .. and add texts and / or images.
As a user of the Ability Hub app, you can choose to comment on any post, or the comment on the post. The Ability Hub app is very similar to any other social networking app where a thread of conversation is allowed on any post.
As a user of the Ability Hub app, you can show your support or admiration for a post or comments on your timeline.
Patient Details
The Ability Hub app allows capturing a very detailed set of health about your patients. See the screenshots below for various fields that can be captured in the Ability Hub.
Medical History
The app lets you keep a fairly detailed history and notes about your patient. This is key when you visit a health professional or a medical facility. All the key information and/or incidents are in one place. The platform will soon be able to generate a summary of the activities for a quick review by the health professionals.
Patient Information
The Ability Hub app allows capturing a very detailed set of information about your patients. See the screenshots below for various fields that can be captured and managed in the Ability Hub.
Unusual Incidents
An unusual incident, also called a UI, is an event or occurrence involving a person that is not consistent with routine operations, policies, and procedures, or the person's care or service plan, but is not a major unusual incident. The incidents may range from a simple fall to a dental issue, a behavioral incident that is not aligned with regular expectations, or even an error in administering medicine.
The Ability Hub app will let you capture the incident, and its duration and even have any associated pictures or notes.
Health Assessments
Health assessments are usually structured screening and assessment tools used in primary care practices to help the health care team and patient develop a plan of care. This tool lets a caregiver capture periodic assessments that can help a health professional observe and spot any major changes or deviations early.
Calendar
The calendar functionality or screen lets you manage all your caregiving obligations in one place. Optionally, you may also sync this with your device calendar as well.
Documents
The Ability Hub platform lets you manage and organize all your documents and photos in a secure, yet easy-to-manage way. You can navigate your documents in a listing or as a thumbnail.
Requests
The Requests screen, accessible via an icon on the bottom right lets you see all your requests and their current status. These include all requests in your circle.
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