Mediating Informal Care Online: Findings from an Extensive Requirements Analysis

Organizing and satisfying the increasing demand for social and informal care for older adults is an important topic. We aim at building a peerto-peer exchange platform that empowers older adults to benefit from receiving support for daily activities and reciprocally offering support to others. In situated interviews and within a survey we investigated the requirements and needs of 246 older adults with mild impairments. Additionally, we conducted an interpretative role analysis of older adults’ collaborative care processes (i.e., support exchange practices) in order to identify social roles and understand the inherent expectations towards the execution of support. We will describe our target group in the form of personas and different social roles, as well as user requirements for establishing a successful peer-to-peer collaboration. We also consider our finding from the perspective of social capital theory that allows us to describe in our requirements how relationships provide valuable social resources (i.e., social capital) for informal and social care.