Mom As Caregiver And Inventor

In October 2020, I saw a piece on the news about a mom who built an app to help care for her son, who was living with chronic pain. It made me realize how often we forget about all the caregiver moms.

Parents are the first witness to chronic pain attacking their child, yet it is something they can do little to protect them from. Parents can feel helpless. This mom, a professor at Oberlin College, worked with her students to find a way to help her son. He suffered from debilitating and isolating chronic migraines. They created an app to help her son and caregivers overcome pain obstacles.

The app is now a tool to track progress, victories, and to motivate to go forward and take control of the pain.

Here’s how it works. Those living with the pain can:

• Use the Weekly Log to evaluate where they are and set concrete goals for where they’d like to be next.

• Use the Daily Log to track positive and negative moods, daily life activities, self-care, caring for others, and pain.

• Use the Visualizer to look at the relationship between activities, emotions, and pain.

Caregiver mode, which is unique to 1Step2Life lets parents, spouses, and other caregivers:

• Use the Weekly and Daily logs to keep track of the emotions, activities, and pain of the person they are caring for.

Supports positive caregiving that:

• Helps build and sustain a relationship that focuses on the whole person, not just their pain condition or illness.

• Supports the autonomy and self-care of the person being cared for.

Read more and see the story here.