Proposal Title: Meerkat Village: A Digital Care Coordination Platform for Caregivers

Research Objectives: To evaluate the usability of Meerkat Village among a sample of end-users

Design: Cross-sectional, quantitative study

Setting: Community Setting

Participants: We are actively recruiting a target N=24 participants to trial MV. Usability will be investigated using both objective questionnaires (quantitative) and semi-structured focus groups (qualitative).

Interventions: Usability is being assessed according to the Technology Acceptance Model which considers end-users perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usability in respect to the system of interest (Davis et al., 1985). Usability will be investigated using both objective questionnaires (quantitative) and semi-structured focus groups (qualitative). Guiding questions will be used to ensure that focus group discussions include topics such as learnability and set-up burden of the Meerkat Village ecosystem, need for technology support, and external use variables (e.g., internet access, operating systems among user phones) that influence the ease of use and usefulness of the app.

Main Outcome Measures: Technology Acceptance Model qualitative (focus group) and quantitative (questionnaires) data will be analyzed via descriptive statistics and for themes via the constant comparison approach.

Results: Initial results include both positive codes (facilitators), to include: Practical solution, Unique solution, Intuitive. Codes illuminating areas of improvement (barriers), to include: Hesitancy related to privacy technical verbiage, Set-up challenges, User challenges.

Conclusions Our initial findings have aided in our understanding of the design and function strengths and weakness of Meerkat Village. Importantly, participants have expressed strong perceived value for Meerkat Village as this application addresses a pressing need within the caregiver population. However, several barriers have also been elucidated and will need to be addressed in order to facilitate widespread use in the real-world context.

Author(s) Disclosures: This study is funded through the UpPrize - BNY Mellon Social Innovation Challenge Award.