Designing Technology for less literate people with diabetes in Punjab, Pakistan

Digital health uses information communication technology to provide healthcare services ef-fectively. This research uses Human-Computer Interaction methodologies such as participatory design and iterative prototype evaluation to effectively design technology for people in the rural areas of Punjab, Pakistan.Many participants in this PhD research have a low literacy level, making it challenging for them to obtain the knowledge necessary to manage their common chronic health conditions, such as diabetes. The remoteness of these participants, the lack of transport, and the internet inaccessibility only exacerbate this healthcare self-management. The research focused on designing an Interactive Voice Response system using participatory design methodologies.Interactive Voice Response (IVR) is an accessible method of transmitting knowledge because it allows voice-based interaction. To assist illiterate populations in managing chronic health conditions, hierarchical IVR systems are currently being developed and pose the challenge of navigating a large amount of information with hierarchy. Therefore, using a phone number-specific profile, this project iteratively develops a dynamic IVR that adapts information presen-ted to people with diabetes to compensate for some of their challenges in healthcare support. Multiple design studies and deployments are conducted to validate the IVR system.The IVR system was designed iteratively using Participatory Design (PD) to explore users’ pref-erences. Although PD originated in Scandinavia, it poses several challenges since it assumes literacy and a cultural mindset associated with the Global North. Hence, it is necessary to adopt democratic, patient-centred, iterative participatory approaches to develop a comprehensive understanding of PD in a diverse and challenging environment, including both urban and rural contexts. Several PD techniques were used, including Wizard of Context, Narrative Scoping with Personas, an interactive framework that used videos, pictures and audio, and iterative PD.After deploying the IVR system using servers built on the Asterisk platform, the system’s usefulness for keeping people with diabetes informed about their condition and better managing their condition was demonstrated by gathering qualitative and quantitative data

MULTI-MODAL TASK INSTRUCTIONS TO ROBOTS BY NAIVE USERS

This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the design of user-programmable robots. The objective of the work is to investigate multi-modal unconstrained natural instructions given to robots in order to design a learning robot. A corpus-centred approach is used to design an agent that can reason, learn and interact with a human in a natural unconstrained way. The corpus-centred design approach is formalised and developed in detail. It requires the developer to record a human during interaction and analyse the recordings to find instruction primitives. These are then implemented into a robot. The focus of this work has been on how to combine speech and gesture using rules extracted from the analysis of a corpus. A multi-modal integration algorithm is presented, that can use timing and semantics to group, match and unify gesture and language. The algorithm always achieves correct pairings on a corpus and initiates questions to the user in ambiguous cases or missing information. The domain of card games has been investigated, because of its variety of games which are rich in rules and contain sequences. A further focus of the work is on the translation of rule-based instructions. Most multi-modal interfaces to date have only considered sequential instructions. The combination of frame-based reasoning, a knowledge base organised as an ontology and a problem solver engine is used to store these rules. The understanding of rule instructions, which contain conditional and imaginary situations require an agent with complex reasoning capabilities. A test system of the agent implementation is also described. Tests to confirm the implementation by playing back the corpus are presented. Furthermore, deployment test results with the implemented agent and human subjects are presented and discussed. The tests showed that the rate of errors that are due to the sentences not being defined in the grammar does not decrease by an acceptable rate when new grammar is introduced. This was particularly the case for complex verbal rule instructions which have a large variety of being expressed