ReRide:A Platform to Explore Interaction with Personal Data Before, During, and After Motorcycle Commuting

Part 7: DemonstrationsInternational audienceThe motorcycle could soon be the new frontier for the exploration of human interaction with advanced digital technology. In this paper we present a demo of a system designed and implemented to explore the design of personal informatics tools for motorbike commuting and help us conduct in-situ evaluation of such tools. We present the system architecture and demonstrate the capabilities of the system by presenting a case instantiation in the form of an interactive soft-and-hardware prototype that collects rider’s posture data, visualizes the data on the motorbike dashboard in real-time, and pushes the data to the cloud server for later retrieval

Reconsidering Network Management Interfaces for Communities

Community-owned mesh wireless networks enable cost-effective sharing of networked resources, expanding internet and local service accessibility through low-cost WiFi hardware. However, maintaining these networks comes with expenses. In addition to hardware costs, community members need extensive training to install, monitor, and troubleshoot the networks using Network Management Interfaces (NMIs). Effective network management is crucial for CWN resilience within communities. This paper presents qualitative interviews with 25 stakeholders from two CWNs in India and four in South Africa, examining challenges to CWN resilience. Workshops were conducted with network operators and users in India (Janastu) and prospective operators in South Africa (FOCUS Network) to reimagine NMIs, discussing challenges and prototyping interfaces. Our findings highlights diverse network management approaches, revealing difficulties in technical capacity building, troubleshooting, and prototyping. Designing NMIs with local network operators’ insights and skills is crucial for CWN sustainability. The paper outlines design opportunities to improve network management interfaces for CWNs, fostering network resilience for critical infrastructures

CoLRN - A Community-Based Vision for Local Resilient Networks

In this research, we share our findings from a series of design workshops with community wireless network members and their users in India and Africa to develop a community-based vision for resilient local networks. We simultaneously leveraged existing projects in India and South Africa around network management interfaces and local content creation to evaluate our design strategies to foster resilience and effectiveness in empowering community networks. Through this work, we identified the challenges and opportunities for innovative approaches to leveraging networked technologies to bring communities together to learn from each other on how they manage and use their community network. We highlight key opportunities to explore a) infrastructural resilience through community-centred design of network management tools, and b) novel approaches to support content creation tapping community desires to capture local knowledge, through annotation of digital stories and production of radio content

Infrastructural artefacts in community health: a case study of pregnancy care infrastructures in south India

The work of frontline health workers providing access to pregnancy care services to women in South India is highly distributed and often overlooked in the design of healthcare infrastructures. Unlike clinical and nonclinical personnel who engage in different care practices within and across hospital departments with clearly established work roles, the work of frontline workers is performed across different geographical areas beyond the boundaries of the hospital and with loosely defined roles and resources making the coordination of work more complex. Based on a case study investigating the work of frontline health workers, we report a number of material infrastructural arrangements (the Thayi Card, physical and digital registers, and mobile phones) that played a major role supporting community health practices. We conclude by discussing the opportunities that these artefacts offer for the design of healthcare infrastructures

Embodied negotiations, practices and experiences interacting with pregnancy care infrastructures in South India

Behavior change and improving health literacy based on normative ideals of motherhood is a dominant paradigm to address maternal health challenges. However, these ideals often remove women's control over their bodies overlooking how the bodily experiences of pregnancy are socially and culturally constructed. We report on 27 interviews with pregnant women and nursing mothers in rural and semi-urban areas of South India, and six focus groups with 23 frontline health workers as secondary data. We explore how the embodied pregnancy experiences are influenced and negotiated by the socio-cultural context and existing care infrastructures. Our findings highlight how the ways of seeing, knowing, and caring for a body of a pregnant woman through often conflicting norms, beliefs and practices of medicine, nourishment and care actively shape the experiences of pregnancy. We open up a space for novel opportunities for digital health technologies to enhance women's embodied experiences and pregnancy care infrastructures in the Global South