Circles of Care

Our lives are increasingly becoming more flexible, connected and mobile. In contrast, hospitalization involves dependency, immobility and isolation. Everyday life is disrupted.

The aim of Circles of Care is to maintain a continuum of a person’s social, family and work life while hospitalized. It is about looking for ways to help patients retain a sense of normality in an extreme situation, and about believing that communication with loved ones and small, timely comforts can make a big difference in the patient’s life.

Circles of Care is a service mediating the relationship between the hospital patient and their social circle. Using it, friends & family can provide comforts, participate in events remotely and maintain flows of communication with the patient. The service is personal, adaptive to local conditions, and accessible through a variety of technologies.

Circles of Care caters to the following needs:
1. Keeping the continuum of social and family life while hospitalized. Close friends organize a TV night with the patient, which allows them to communicate in real-time over remote locations.
2. Catering for distant relationships and social obligations. A colleague orders a gift from the patient’s wish list and has it delivered to the patient’s bed-side.
3. Bridging distance / keeping group identity Family and friends record a get-well song to be delivered to the patient in hospital without the chorus members having to be in the same place at the same time.
4. Caring for strangers Anyone can choose comforts from wish lists that were made by lonely people, and send improve their hospital experience by giving them something they want.

The service should be scalable to local conditions and accessible through a variety of technologies. It should also offer a variety of long and short-term solutions to cater for varying lengths of hospitalization.
The potential benefit is not only for the users, but also for possible stakeholders such as medical insurance companies who might sponsor the service. Having happier patients also mean reducing the costs of their hospitalization. It is a known fact that psychological factors affect patients’ physical condition, and that patients with positive attitude are likely to recover faster from their illness.

This service has been conceived and developed for the specific case of the hospital. The general concept and also some specific ideas could easily be applied to other situations/contexts such as elderly homes, student campus, and in any situations in which people live far away from their loved ones.