The Impact of Mobile Phone Reminders on Perceived Self-Care Levels of Informal Caregivers

• Published in: Informatics (Basel) Vol. 9; no. 3; p. 59
• Main Authors: Peres, Beatriz, Gouveia, Élvio Rúbio, Campos, Pedro F
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.08.2022
• Subjects: Activities of daily living; Analysis; Care of the sick; Caregivers; Cellular telephones; Dementia; Equipment and supplies; Health aspects; human-computer interaction; Impact analysis; informal caregivers; Mental health; Practice; Psychological aspects; Qualitative research; Quality of life; Rank tests; reminders; self-care; Self-care, Health; Stress; Portugal
• ISSN: 2227-9709; 2227-9709
• DOI: 10.3390/informatics9030059

Informal caregivers play a fundamental role in caring for people that need assistance and provide an effective service in managing their loved ones’ health. Because of this, they have little time to attend to themselves and perform self-care practices. Some of these practices can improve mental health. By snowball sampling, we recruited 15 informal caregivers, 12 females and three males. Using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test, we analyzed the impact of the reminders on a self-care scale. We used the Mindful Self-Care Scale, comparing the same population without reminders and with reminders. Results indicated that total self-care scores with reminders increased statistically significantly, T = 13, Z = −2.481, p ≤ 0.013, with a large effect size (r = 0.64). This study shows a significant self-care increase in informal caregivers after using reminders. Future development of a reminders-based approach could focus on increasing self-care and the time caregivers take for themselves, empowering them to take a more active role in meeting their own needs.