Home Health & Hospice Week

A $1.5 million federal grant may eventually make life, and work, easier for some of your employees. The National Science Foundation has awarded the three-year grant to an interdisciplinary medical and information technology team of Cornell researchers who aim to make tech tools that will assist home health aides.

“Home health aides are asked to do a huge amount in terms of task management, care management, meal management, health care management — and all of these things are a really big burden,” says information science professor Nicola Dell, principal investigator on the grant. “The goal of this grant is to explore the space of designing technologies to make their work easier, better and more efficient, with the hope that we can have a positive impact not only on their own professional lives, but on the care that they deliver.”

Researchers will also investigate ways to improve communication between aides and their employers, Cornell says in a release.