In orphanages, children often miss out on individualized attention they need due to limited caregivers. Inspired by a desire to bridge this gap, CareBridge is designed to help caregivers track and support each child’s growth, making it easier to offer the personal care every child deserves.
In orphanages, caregivers often face the overwhelming challenge of attending to numerous children with limited resources. This shortage of individualized attention can lead to gaps in each child’s emotional and developmental needs. Additionally, caregivers struggle to monitor children's daily progress closely, impacting their ability to provide timely support and guidance.
Our mission is to empower caregivers with a simple, user-friendly app that enables them to monitor each child’s well-being more effectively. By bridging the gap in personalized attention, we aim to enhance the quality of care and support each child’s growth and development in meaningful ways.
Our literature review focused on understanding how orphanages globally, and specifically in Pakistan, utilize technology, along with insights into child behavior management and caregiver support. Despite the pressing need for solutions, we found limited technological interventions addressing the daily challenges of orphanages.
Technology in Orphanages: Globally and locally, technological interventions in orphanages focus on education, healthcare, and donation facilitation, but they often overlook caregivers' day-to-day operational needs, with Pakistani orphanages relying mostly on traditional management and limited caregiver training.
Challenges in Pakistani Orphanages: Pakistan, home to over 4.6 million orphans, faces challenges in providing individualized attention, with studies revealing behavioral problems linked to factors like institutionalization length, caregiver stress, and mental health neglect.
Behaviorial and Emotional Insights: Research highlights significant behavioral and emotional issues among children in orphanages, often linked to a lack of individualized attention and caregiver training. Studies from Pakistan underscore the high prevalence of behavioral problems and mental health issues among orphans.
This review underscored the need to design solutions that cater to the specific cultural and infrastructural needs of Pakistani orphanages, addressing behavioral and emotional challenges by equipping caregivers with tools for personalized support. We envisioned our app to focus on enhancing administrative tasks, allowing caregivers to manage responsibilities more efficiently while providing insights and reports for each child to improve care quality.
For primary research, we opted for semi-structured interviews as our primary research method to allow for flexibility while ensuring that we gathered consistent, comparable data across participants. This approach enabled us to explore specific themes while also providing room for caregivers to share their unique perspectives, which was essential for understanding the diverse challenges faced in orphanage management. Semi-structured interviews allow for dynamic conversations, where we could adapt the questions based on responses, enabling us to probe deeper into important issues as they arose.
The iterative refinement of our interview protocol demonstrates the adaptive nature of qualitative research. By responding to emerging insights and refining our focus, we were able to gather richer, more actionable data. This informed the development of CareBridge as a tailored solution that addresses caregivers’ most pressing needs, particularly in providing personalized care and managing administrative tasks efficiently.
Through 15 semi-structured interviews with orphanage staff and administrators, we identified key themes that highlighted the challenges and opportunities in caregiving at orphanages. These findings informed the development of CareBridge to address gaps in individualized attention, communication, and operational efficiency.
Individualized Attention: Caregivers emphasized the importance of personalized care but noted significant challenges due to high staff-to-child ratios. Many relied on older children to support younger ones, a strategy that, while practical, raised concerns about effectiveness and fairness. This theme underscored the need for tools to better track and address the unique needs of each child.
Communication Gaps: A disconnect between administrative staff and caregivers emerged as a critical issue. Administrators expressed a desire to oversee daily activities more closely but were often consumed by managerial tasks. Caregivers reported inconsistent communication channels, leading to missed updates on children’s needs and incidents. This gap highlighted the potential for technology to streamline information sharing and decision-making.
Technology Usage: Most orphanages maintained digital and physical records of children’s details, but technology was not fully integrated into daily operations. Smartphones were commonly used for communication, and some orphanages had computer labs for children. However, there was limited use of technology to support administrative tasks or caregiving responsibilities, pointing to a significant opportunity for intervention.
Emotional Support and Counseling: Caregivers frequently referred to “counseling” as informal conversations to address children’s issues, but professional psychological support was rare. Only one orphanage employed a psychologist for regular sessions, signaling a gap in addressing children’s emotional needs systematically.
These insights directly informed the design of CareBridge, emphasizing features to streamline administrative tasks, enable efficient tracking of children’s progress, and improve communication between staff and administrators. By addressing these pain points, the project aimed to empower caregivers with tools to enhance both operational efficiency and the quality of care provided to children.
The design solutions for CareBridge were developed to address the key challenges identified through thematic analysis, focusing on improving individualized attention, streamlining communication, and enhancing administrative efficiency. The proposed solutions were tailored to the needs of caregivers and administrators while considering the resource constraints and technological familiarity of orphanages in Pakistan.
Child Progress Dashboard: A centralized dashboard allows caregivers and administrators to monitor each child’s development and needs in a structured manner. This should ideally include
Individual child profiles with milestones, health updates, and behavioral notes.
Alerts for overdue tasks, upcoming milestones, or unresolved issues.
Visual progress indicators
Communication Log System: A digital log streamlines information sharing between caregivers and administrators, bridging the communication gap. This should ideally inlcude:
Incident reporting system for caregivers to log children’s issues or behaviors.
A notification system for administrators to provide feedback or updates.
Shared access to a timeline of events for transparency.
Administrative Task Manager: An integrated tool simplifies daily operations, reducing the burden on both caregivers and administrators. This should ideally include:
Task scheduling for caregiver responsibilities such as meal prep or school drop-offs.
Automated reminders for recurring tasks like health checkups or reports.
Resource tracking for donations and inventory.
Emotional and Behavioral Support Tracker: A specialized tool to address the gap in systematic emotional and behavioral support for children. This should ideally inlcude:
Customizable questionnaires for caregivers to assess children’s emotional well-being.
A recommendation system suggesting age-appropriate interventions based on caregiver inputs (e.g., group activities or one-on-one counseling).
Optional integration with external professionals, such as psychologists, for periodic evaluations.
By focusing on data-driven features tailored to the operational realities of orphanages, CareBridge aims to empower caregivers and administrators to deliver better care and support for children in need.
