Sugar Ka Saathi – A Case Study Designing Digital Self-management Tools for People Living with Diabetes in Pakistan

This paper presents the results of an iterative participatory process to design a smart self-management tool for less-literate people living with diabetes in Pakistan. Initially, interviews and focus groups with sixty-nine people living with diabetes identified issues that they face when self-managing including un-controllable factors, lack of diabetes awareness, low-tech mobile phones, and poor internet availability. We developed personas grounded in the scoping results and adjusted our PD approach to focus on more tangible design artefacts before running narrative scoping PD sessions. Working from older, illiterate persona, we designed a phone-line delivered Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. We developed a functional IVR Prototype “Sugar ka Saathi” (Diabetes Companion) with input from a group of 4 Pakistan-based healthcare professionals, to act as a design probe in the PD process. We tested the IVR probe with fifty-seven of the original scoping participants which validated the knowledge transferred by the IVR and its acceptability. Invisible design videos were shown to elaborate the IVR and community concept to thirteen participants through two filmed videos using our existing persona characters from the scoping studies, these videos helped to engage older people with diabetes in PD sessions

Implications of Synchronous IVR Radio on Syrian Refugee Health and Community Dynamics

With 1,033,513 Syrian refugees adding a strain on the Lebanese healthcare system, innovation is key to improving access to healthcare. Our previous work identified the potential for technology to improve access to antenatal care services and increase refugee agency. Using (1) paper mock ups and a mobile based prototype, (2) process mapping, (3) focus groups and interviews and (4) key informant meetings, we explored the concept of refugee led community radio shows to deliver peer-led healthcare. We observed the influence of community radio shows on Syrian refugee health education, community dynamics and community agency in relationships between healthcare providers and refugees. Refugees were positively impacted through situating the technology within the community. We highlight issues around trust, agency, understanding, sel-forganization and privacy that resulted from running the shows through mock ups and a mobile based prototype. Our findings inform future work in community run radio shows

Rule of Thumb: Mobiles for governance in India

Between 1996 and 2012, India's standing dropped on five of the six indicators of governance developed by the World Bank. Today, with over 900 million mobile phone subscriptions, India's mobile revolution presents an unprecedented opportunity to address this deficit and bring good governance to the farthest corners of the country. Adding 10 mobile phones per 100 people in a developing country can lead to half a point of additional GDP growth per person. Rule of Thumb makes a case for m-governance, and for reimagining the ways in which governments and citizens function, transact and interact with each other. It also explores how, in India and the world over, non-profits and social businesses are marrying the ubiquity of mobile technology with governance systems and processes to produce great benefits for citizens and governments alike. Dasra mapped over 130 organizations and profiled the work of 11 organizations with the most impactful and scalable programs

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

Technology for Good: Innovative Use of Technology by Charities

Technology for Good identifies ten technologies being used by charitable organizations in innovative ways. The report briefly introduces each technology and provides examples of how those technologies are being used.Examples are drawn from a broad spectrum of organizations working on widely varied issues around the globe. This makes Technology for Good a unique repository of inspiration for the public and private sectors, funders, and other change makers who support the creation and use of technology for social good

mWASH: Mobile Phone Applications for the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Sector

This report assesses how water and sanitation practitioners have begun to tap the potential of mobile phones as tools to improve water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) services. Coined "mWASH" solutions, this report analyzes how mobile technology applications are already being tapped in many areas, such as health, agriculture, and disaster relief, as well as WASH. The ten case studies call out lessons critical for developing robust mWASH applications. Using SMS, email, or the web, citizens and residents can remotely report conditions such as poor water quality and sewage backflow, register lack of infrastructure to aid in network expansion, and view information on the status of service provision and problem resolution

ICT Update 68: Women and ICTs

ICT Update is a bimonthly printed and on-line magazine (http://ictupdate.cta.int) and an accompanying e-mail newsletter published by CTA. This issue focuses on women and ICTs

Deepfakes and disinformation: Exploring the impact of synthetic political video on deception, uncertainty, and trust in news

Artificial Intelligence (AI) now enables the mass creation of what have become known as “deepfakes”: synthetic videos that closely resemble real videos. Integrating theories about the power of visual communication and the role played by uncertainty in undermining trust in public discourse, we explain the likely contribution of deepfakes to online disinformation. Administering novel experimental treatments to a large representative sample of the UK population allowed us to compare people’s evaluations of deepfakes. We find that people are more likely to feel uncertain than to be misled by deepfakes, but this resulting uncertainty, in turn, reduces trust in news on social media. We conclude that deepfakes may contribute toward generalized indeterminacy and cynicism, further intensifying recent challenges to online civic culture in democratic societie

Introduction to Development Engineering

This open access textbook introduces the emerging field of Development Engineering and its constituent theories, methods, and applications. It is both a teaching text for students and a resource for researchers and practitioners engaged in the design and scaling of technologies for low-resource communities. The scope is broad, ranging from the development of mobile applications for low-literacy users to hardware and software solutions for providing electricity and water in remote settings. It is also highly interdisciplinary, drawing on methods and theory from the social sciences as well as engineering and the natural sciences. The opening section reviews the history of “technology-for-development” research, and presents a framework that formalizes this body of work and begins its transformation into an academic discipline. It identifies common challenges in development and explains the book’s iterative approach of “innovation, implementation, evaluation, adaptation.” Each of the next six thematic sections focuses on a different sector: energy and environment; market performance; education and labor; water, sanitation and health; digital governance; and connectivity. These thematic sections contain case studies from landmark research that directly integrates engineering innovation with technically rigorous methods from the social sciences. Each case study describes the design, evaluation, and/or scaling of a technology in the field and follows a single form, with common elements and discussion questions, to create continuity and pedagogical consistency. Together, they highlight successful solutions to development challenges, while also analyzing the rarely discussed failures. The book concludes by reiterating the core principles of development engineering illustrated in the case studies, highlighting common challenges that engineers and scientists will face in designing technology interventions that sustainably accelerate economic development. Development Engineering provides, for the first time, a coherent intellectual framework for attacking the challenges of poverty and global climate change through the design of better technologies. It offers the rigorous discipline needed to channel the energy of a new generation of scientists and engineers toward advancing social justice and improved living conditions in low-resource communities around the world