External Evaluation of Mobile Phone Tchnology-based Nutrition and Agriculture Advisory Services in Africa: Final Ghana Mixed Methods Evaluation Report

e-PactThis final mixed methods report forms part of the external impact evaluation of mNutrition in Ghana. The evaluation was conducted by a consortium of researchers from Gamos, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) between 2016 and 2020. Mnutrition was a global initiative supported by DFID, organised by GSMA, and implemented by in-country mobile network operators (MNOs) and other providers to use mobile technology to improve the health and nutritional status of children and adults in low-income countries. In Ghana, mNutrition was added to the existing m-Agriculture platform Vodafone Farmers’ Club, a service that offered agricultural information via SMS (short message service) and recorded voice messages, access to an expert helpline and free calls to other Farmers’ Club members. This report summarises the final findings of the mNutrition evaluation in Ghana drawn from across the three interlinked evaluation components (quantitative, qualitative and business model) and structured around the key overarching evaluation questions. For more details on the technical and methodological aspects of the evaluation please refer to the separate methods-specific technical reports

Project SAM: Developing an app to provide self-help for anxiety

An interdisciplinary team at the University of the West of England (UWE) was commissioned and funded to develop a mobile phone app which would provide self-help options for the management of mild to moderate anxiety. The completed app would extend the range and availability of psychological support for student well-being at UWE and other higher education institutions.The project team consisted of two computer scientists and one psychologist who were responsible for the technical, functional and clinical specification of the app. A local mobile app development company was appointed and the teams collaborated on the design, build and evaluation of the app. The self-help structure and components were developed in consultation with therapeutic practitioners, in and out of UWE. The developer team advised on and constructed multi-media features to realise the self-help aims of the app.The UWE project team promoted an iterative approach to development, evaluating each stage of development through trials with expert users, practitioners and students. The app, named SAM (Self-help for Anxiety Management), was developed for Apple and Android operating systems, to be usable on smartphones and tablets. SAM was launched in the app stores in July 2013, globally available and free to download for the first year of operation. It was promoted to students, educational institutions, mental health organisations and charities as well as a range of professional and informal contacts. A UWE-based Advisory Board was convened to oversee the maintenance and development of the university’s investment in SAM. Members include the project team, researchers, therapists and other staff with an interest in its use to support student well-being. Three key tasks of the Board are to ensure SAM’s financial sustainability, to oversee developments in its usability and self-help components, and to obtain funding for the evaluation of its therapeutic impact

Systematic Review on Privacy Categorization

In the modern digital world users need to make privacy and security choices that have far-reaching consequences. Researchers are increasingly studying people's decisions when facing with privacy and security trade-offs, the pressing and time consuming disincentives that influence those decisions, and methods to mitigate them. This work aims to present a systematic review of the literature on privacy categorization, which has been defined in terms of profile, profiling, segmentation, clustering and personae. Privacy categorization involves the possibility to classify users according to specific prerequisites, such as their ability to manage privacy issues, or in terms of which type of and how many personal information they decide or do not decide to disclose. Privacy categorization has been defined and used for different purposes. The systematic review focuses on three main research questions that investigate the study contexts, i.e. the motivations and research questions, that propose privacy categorisations; the methodologies and results of privacy categorisations; the evolution of privacy categorisations over time. Ultimately it tries to provide an answer whether privacy categorization as a research attempt is still meaningful and may have a future

Designing the Health-related Internet of Things: Ethical Principles and Guidelines

The conjunction of wireless computing, ubiquitous Internet access, and the miniaturisation of sensors have opened the door for technological applications that can monitor health and well-being outside of formal healthcare systems. The health-related Internet of Things (H-IoT) increasingly plays a key role in health management by providing real-time tele-monitoring of patients, testing of treatments, actuation of medical devices, and fitness and well-being monitoring. Given its numerous applications and proposed benefits, adoption by medical and social care institutions and consumers may be rapid. However, a host of ethical concerns are also raised that must be addressed. The inherent sensitivity of health-related data being generated and latent risks of Internet-enabled devices pose serious challenges. Users, already in a vulnerable position as patients, face a seemingly impossible task to retain control over their data due to the scale, scope and complexity of systems that create, aggregate, and analyse personal health data. In response, the H-IoT must be designed to be technologically robust and scientifically reliable, while also remaining ethically responsible, trustworthy, and respectful of user rights and interests. To assist developers of the H-IoT, this paper describes nine principles and nine guidelines for ethical design of H-IoT devices and data protocols

Wearables at work:preferences from an employee’s perspective

This exploratory study aims to obtain a first impression of the wishes and needs of employees on the use of wearables at work for health promotion. 76 employ-ees with a mean age of 40 years old (SD ±11.7) filled in a survey after trying out a wearable. Most employees see the potential of using wearable devices for workplace health promotion. However, according to employees, some negative aspects should be overcome before wearables can effectively contribute to health promotion. The most mentioned negative aspects were poor visualization and un-pleasantness of wearing. Specifically for the workplace, employees were con-cerned about the privacy of data collection

How to make classrooms creative and open spaces: ARIS games, digital artifacts and storytelling

As part of long-term research into interviewing users and visualizing digital artifacts, we have created a parallel archives of projects in our classroom. Ethnography helps us to discover the temporal trends of interactions with students and with the virtual environment. The outcomes expected motived us to repurpouse stories we co-create with students in a new form, retelling motivations, design, narratives, into a gaming scenario where the use of experiences become more digital and less tangible but always snapshots of their social existence.Peer Reviewe

The enchanted house:An analysis of the interaction of intelligent personal home assistants (IPHAs) with the private sphere and its legal protection

Abstract In less than five years, Alexa has become a familiar presence in many households, and even those who do not own one have stumbled into it, be it at a friend’s house or in the news. Amazon Alexa and its friend Google Assistant represent an evolution of IoT: they have an advanced ‘intelligence’ based on Cloud computing and Machine Learning; they collect data and process them to profile and understand users, and they are placed inside our home. I refer to them as intelligent personal and home assistants, or IPHAs.  This research applies multidisciplinary resources to explore the phenomenon of IPHAs from two perspectives. From a more socio-technical angle, the research reflects upon what happens to the private sphere and the home once IPHAs enter it. To do so, it looks at theories and concepts borrowed from history, behavioural science, STSs, philosophy, and behavioural design. All these disciplines contribute to highlight different attributes that individuals and society associate with the private sphere and the home. When the functioning of IPHAs is mapped against these attributes it is possible to identify where Alexa and Assistant might have an impact: there is a potential conflict between the privacy expectations and norms existing in the home (as sanctuary of the private sphere) and the marketing interests introduced in the home by IPHAs’ profiling. Because of the voice-interaction, IPHAs are also potentially highly persuasive, can influence and manipulate users and affect their autonomy and control in their daily lives. From the legal perspective, the research explores the application of the GDPR and proposal for e-Privacy Regulation to IPHAs, as legislative tools for the protection of the private sphere in horizontal relationships. The analysis focuses in particular on those provisions whose application to IPHAs is more challenging, based on the technology but also on the sociotechnical analysis above. Special attention is dedicated to the consent of users to the processing, the general principles of the GDPR, attributing the role of controllers or processors to the stakeholders involved, profiling and automated decisions, data protection by design and default, as well as spam and robocalls. For some of the issues, suggestions are offered on how to interpret and apply the legal framework, in order to mitigate undesired effects. This is the case, for instance, of determining whether the owners of IPHAs should be considered controllers vis-à-vis the data of their guests, or of the implications of data protection by design and default on the design of IPHAs. Some questions, however, require a wider debate at societal and political level. This is the case of the behavioural design techniques used to entice users and stimulate them to use the vocal assistants, which present high levels of persuasion and can affect the agency and autonomy of individuals. The research brings forward the necessity to determine where the line should be drawn between acceptable practices and unacceptable ones

Moment-to-moment Engagement Prediction through the Eyes of the Observer: PUBG Streaming on Twitch

Is it possible to predict moment-to-moment gameplay engagement based solely on game telemetry? Can we reveal engaging moments of gameplay by observing the way the viewers of the game behave? To address these questions in this paper, we reframe the way gameplay engagement is defined and we view it, instead, through the eyes of a game's live audience. We build prediction models for viewers' engagement based on data collected from the popular battle royale game PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds as obtained from the Twitch streaming service. In particular, we collect viewers' chat logs and in-game telemetry data from several hundred matches of five popular streamers (containing over 100,000 game events) and machine learn the mapping between gameplay and viewer chat frequency during play, using small neural network architectures. Our key findings showcase that engagement models trained solely on 40 gameplay features can reach accuracies of up to 80% on average and 84% at best. Our models are scalable and generalisable as they perform equally well within- and across-streamers, as well as across streamer play styles.Comment: Version accepted for the Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games 2020 - Malt

External Evaluation of Mobile Phone Technology-Based Nutrition and Agriculture Advisory Services in Africa: Mobile Phones, Agriculture, and Nutrition in Ghana: Qualitative Follow-Up Study Report

mNutrition is a global initiative supported by the UK Department for International Development, (DFID), organised by Groupe Spéciale Mobile Association (GSMA), and implemented by in-country MNOs and third-party providers. It aims to use mobile technology to improve the health and nutritional status of children and adults in the developing world. The potential to utilise mobile technology to change attitudes, knowledge, behaviours, and practices around health and agriculture for improved nutritional status has been recognised for some time, but to date there have been no rigorous evaluations of m-services at scale. A consortium of researchers from Gamos, the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have been contracted to conduct a rigorous mixed-methods evaluation to estimate the impact of two mNutrition services on children and adults, and to clarify how the context and the components of the mNutrition interventions shape their impact