research-article

Craving, creating, and constructing comfort: insights and opportunities for technology in hospice

Authors:

Robert Douglas Ferguson,

Michael Massimi,

Emily Anne Crist,

Karyn Anne MoffattAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

Pages 1479 - 1490

https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531631

Published: 15 February 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Hospice is a medical setting for patients with terminal illnesses where active treatment is withdrawn in favor of providing comfort and dignity at the end of life. Providing comfort extends beyond managing physical pain to include social, emotional, spiritual, and environmental aspects of care. We studied technology's role in achieving these multifaceted dimensions of comfort through interviews with 16 family members of past hospice patients. Comfort was an ongoing pursuit, requiring the involvement of diverse stakeholders; communication technologies were selectively chosen in service of this achievement. We provide opportunities and recommendations for technologies in hospice, including the need for varying degrees of richness and symmetry, and for support for life-affirming acts. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first study, in the CSCW and HCI literatures, of communication technology use during the final days of a person's life, with implications both for hospice and for the end of life more broadly.

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Index Terms

Craving, creating, and constructing comfort: insights and opportunities for technology in hospice
1. Human-centered computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '14: Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing

February 2014

1600 pages

ISBN:9781450325400

DOI:10.1145/2531602

General Chairs:
Susan Fussell
Cornell University
,
Wayne Lutters
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
,
Program Chairs:
Meredith Ringel Morris
Microsoft Research
,
Madhu Reddy
Penn State University

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

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Published: 15 February 2014

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CSCW '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 134 of 497 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3637381
Wolf SFriedrich PHurtienne J(2024)Still Not a Lot of Research? Re-Examining HCI Research on Religion and SpiritualityExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651058(1-15)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613905.3651058
Foong PUreyang NFoo CAntonyrex SKoh G(2024)Designing for Caregiver-facing Values Elicitation ToolsProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642214(1-20)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642214
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