‘Two old ladies on TikTok’ bring caregiving to wider audience 

O’FALLON, Ill. – With dual careers in the home health field, Cindy Hardin-Weiss, MSPT, CAPS, and Christina Hardin-Weiss, MS/SLP, CAPS, have learned a thing or two about what patients need to stay safely in the home. They doubled down on that know-how to create a vibrant online forum of video reviews and demos of adaptive equipment and now have a partnership with Health Mobius. 

“What we do isn't sexy,” said Christina Hardin-Weiss, co-founder of Adaptive Equipment & Caregiving Corner (AECorner). “We are never going to jump in the ring with Mike Tyson and fight him for to get clicks on our videos. But it's something that people need. So, we have that loyal viewership that follows us, and that’s what it's all about for us.” 

Cindy and Christina spoke with HME News recently about how they got started and what they think of their status as “influencers.” 

HME News: How did you get started in the caregiving content business? 

Cindy Hardin-Weiss: In home health care, you get limited time with your clients, and so there seems to be kind of a re-occurring theme of questions on how to do different things. We thought, let's just start making some videos. We can leave the video with them for further review and then when we come back, they can ask questions. We just started doing that in 2015 and we started getting traction on our videos in 2018 and we started getting companies that were sending their products to us wanting us to review them.  

HME: How did the pandemic affect the business? 

Christina Hardin-Weiss: Therapists would go into the homes and do a home safety assessment and then would kind of tweak treatment based on what needed to happen for your patient to go home safely and they stopped doing that during the pandemic, and it never really picked up again. So, we were using those videos to bridge that gap that popped up during the pandemic. People were still going to the hospital and nursing homes, but whenever they left to go back home, skilled care was falling on the caregivers, and they had no idea how to do that. 

HME: Did you ever think at this point in your careers that you'd be so-called influencers?  

Christina Hardin-Weiss: That wasn't our intention. As therapists, part of what you’re being paid to do is to educate the family caregiver and your patient on ways to stay safe in the home and things that you could do for rehabilitation. Our intention was to just raise people's awareness that we're out here and that these products are here so that people know because some of these products can be game changing for a lot of people. 

HME: What sort of feedback do you get from your audience? 

Cindy Hardin-Weiss: People are just hungry for information. It's very obvious. They're asking questions about, “Well, this is what's happened to me, and this is how I'm handling that and how would you suggest this?” And so, the questions are very interesting. We get a lot of good questions.  

Christina Hardin-Weiss: Besides YouTube, where we started, we’re also on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and we always tell people we're even on TikTok, so we're two old ladies on TikTok talking about these products.