By Laura Nuhaan, CEO and Co-Founder FamiliLink
As our worldwide population ages, there will be a significant increase in the number of caregivers providing care and support to our elderly loved ones. Looking at just one specific segment, in 2050 there will be 13.2 M Americans with Alzheimer’s disease - three times what it is today.
Most caregivers are unpaid family members or friends who provide care on either a full- or part-time basis. It is estimated that 80 percent of caregivers provide care giving assistance seven days per week, and the care usually involves personal care assistance and household maintenance chores (AMA). The stress and demand of caregiving can be overwhelming.
Some more facts (s0urce www.caring.com):
- 44 M of Americans providing unpaid care to friends and family
- 59 % of these unpaid caregivers are also are in full-time jobs and 11 % in part-time jobs
- 20 Million Baby boomers are sandwiched between the demands of their jobs and children, wll while caring for aging parents
According to the American Medical Association: Studies show that 16 percent of caregivers report that their health has worsened since taking on the caregiver role, and about half of caregivers who care for someone with Alzheimer’s disease develop psychological distress. In addition, caregiving can result in new financial burdens, with 40 percent of caregivers incurring new financial expenses for care related products, services, and activities. It is estimated that 26 percent of caregivers spend up to 10 percent of their monthly income on caregiving activities.
Being a caregiver is not an easy task and can lead to depression or burn out.
With FamiliLink we want to help provide much needed relief to family caregivers and empower caregivers to more easily manage caregiving tasks wherever possible. Caregivers can more easily facilitate care using FamiliLink features like the calendar to help with scheduling, medication management and reminders.
We realized quickly that help with caring could only be successful if the aging loved one (the care recipient) visited FamiliLink on a daily basis. For this to happen, we had to ensure that there was enough social and engaging content from family members by making it easy for everyone to send messages, photos and videos to the aging loved ones. Knowing that there can be another fun movie clip of a grandson scoring a goal, or a message from their granddaughter waiting for them, makes our older user want to visit FamiliLink frequently. Now that they visit FamiliLink regularly, the caregiver can easily provide support and other helpful information like medication reminders.
FamiliLink can bring some relief to caregivers in the following ways:
- Social engagement and feeling connected is crucial to the well being of a loved one as mentioned in last week’s blog. If the patient feels well, the caregiver will have less stress
- Being able to use preferred communication forms like email or your blackberry will make it easier for a caregiver to communicate with their older loved one
- The use of online schedule tools will make routine care tasks like medication management more efficient
- By asking others to take upon them the tasks to update the loved one’s schedule and ensure there is enough new interesting content for the older loved one to read, responsibilities among caregivers can be shared
- And finally knowing that the older loved one is being well cared for and feeling part of the digital family life, will provide much needed peace of mind to the caregiver
At FamiliLink we will continue to work on creating easy to use tools to relieve the stress of caregiving and provide support to our invaluable caregiver community.
Today there really are no more excuses as to why an older adult is not digitally connected. Seniors are 
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