Student Award from Technology Evaluation for the Elderly (TVN):
May 01, 2015 – August 15th, 2015
Award: $9,000 ($4,500 from TVN with a $4500 from Island Health for a total award of $9,000

Jamie Cassels Undergraduate Research Award (JCURA):
September 09, 2015 – April 29th, 2016
Award: $1,500 in tuition remission

The TVN award provided me with an opportunity to work full-time as a research assistant on a research project on technology in home care. Drs. Debra Sheets (School of Nursing, University of Victoria) and Cheryl Beach (Island Health) served as my interdisciplinary mentors. Our project involved a survey of home care providers to identify barriers to implementation of technology in home care . In particular, we sought to understand knowledge, attitudes and beliefs, and priorities regarding the use of technology in the home care setting. I was involved in revising and resubmitting the ethics application, developing and pilot-testing a research survey and gathering the data and analyzing it. I presented the findings from our study at the 3rd annual TVN research conference in Toronto from September 25-27, 2015.

Under the JCURA award I will continue my work as a research assistant with Dr. Debra Sheets on the eHome iCare project. We are going to implement technology in four homes and develop a frailty measure using continuous data and intermittent assessments. Our goal is to identify trajectories of change in mobility, activity or cognition that are clinically significant and that indicate increased risks requiring additional assessment. I will be presenting our research at the Jamie Cassel’s Undergraduate Research Fair on March 9th.

From the 2015 Fall Communiqué — Public Health