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When a child is hospitalized with a serious illness, their family members must process emotional stress, quickly absorb complicated clinical information, and take on new caregiving tasks. They also have to coordinate with each other and with other family caregivers without abandoning existing work and home life responsibilities. Previous CSCW and HCI research has shown how the patient’s experience changes across the illness journey, but less is known about the effect of this journey on family caregivers and their coordination work. CSCW technologies could support and augment family care coordination work across the journey, reducing stress levels and improving families’ ability to stay connected and informed. In this paper, we report findings from an interview study we conducted with 14 parents of children undergoing extended hospitalization for cancer treatment. We propose the concept of caregiving coordination journeys and describe caregivers’ current communication and coordination practices across different phases of the hospitalization journey, from diagnosis and early hospitalization to extended hospitalization and beyond. We characterize families’ caregiving coordination routines across different time scales, and describe the current role of communication technologies in families’ coordination practices. We then propose design opportunities for social computing technologies to support and augment families’ communication and caregiving work during the hospitalization journey of their child. 

When a child is admitted to the hospital with a critical illness, their family must adapt and manage care and stress. HCI and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) technologies have shown the potential for collaborative technologies to support and augment care collaboration between patients and caregivers. However, less is known about the potential for collaborative technologies to augment family caregiving circles experiences, stressors, and adaptation practices, especially during long hospitalization stays. We interviewed 14 parents of children with cancer admitted for extended hospitalizations in this work. We use the Family Adaptive Systems framework from the family therapy fields as a lens to characterize the challenges and practices of families with a hospitalized child. We characterize the four adaptive systems from the theory: Emotion system, Control system, Meaning, and Maintenance system. Then, we focus on the Emotion system, suggesting opportunities for designing future collaborative technology to augment collaborative caregiving and enhance family resilience. 

Getting the right amount of high quality sleep is crucial for overall health and wellbeing, and pervasive and ubiquitous computing technologies have shown promise for allowing individuals to track and manage their sleep quality. However, sleep technology research has traditionally focused on individual-level solutions. In this paper, we elucidate social requirements for family sleep technologies. We take a family informatics approach to sleep, through an in-home interview study with 10 families with young children. We describe families’ current practices, values, and perceived role for technology, showing that sleep technology has many opportunities beyond individual-level tracking. We also provide design dimensions and implications for family-based sleep technologies, especially the potential for technologies that support family activities and rituals, encourage children’s independence, and provide comfort.