Supporting the knowledge sharing dimension of social support: The case of Aloa-aidants.fr

Aloa-aidants.fr is an online social support application dedicated to family caregivers. Aloa has been designed as a part of an interdisciplinary research project conducted with the cooperation of RéGéMA, a healthcare network dedicated to patients suffering from memory disorders and their family caregivers. In this paper, we present the approach we propose to support the knowledge sharing dimension of social support. The Open Information Retrieval (OIR) framework and socio-semantic web technologies appear of relevance for this purpose at the light of the studies of family caregivers´ offline and online social support practices carried out on the framework of our research project. Illustrations of the implemented functionalities are presented and the results of a preliminary evaluation with family caregivers lead us to discuss the relevance of our approach and future work.