As the global population ages and the prevalence of chronic conditions and acute infections rise, it is becoming imperative to understand the many forms of caregiving labor and create sociotechnical systems that support them. In this paper, we report results of a large survey study with 2000 informal caregivers in the USA, highlighting the fundamental challenges that different types of caregivers face when coordinating care with others. Our findings support previous findings on caregivers’ coordination challenges, while also offering insights into the situational, mediating factors that influence the extent to which care coordination challenges are felt. These mediating factors include caregivers’ relationships, access to a variety of resources including physical, social, and financial support, and physical and mental barriers. We discuss these challenges and mediating factors, and conclude with a discussion on how they can be considered in the design of future sociotechnical systems.

Proliferation of small computing-enabled devices coupled with the richness of communication infrastructure has made location-based computing a reality. Location-based reminders (LBRs) provide alarms and notices to users based on their location. These are typically used to remind us to complete a to-do task at a particular location. The current design of LBRs fails to take advantage of prospective memory theory. We hypothesize that if the encoding stage provides a closer match to the retrieval stage, then location recognition and task recall in LBRs will improve at retrieval time. We conducted a between subjects experiment and measured performance as location recognition and task recall. We found strong evidence in support that a first-person view benefits prospective remembering the most. We close with a discussion of the implications for the design of the encoding stage for future LBR systems.