Using Co-Design to Discern and Overcome Barriers to Employment in Cape Town

In this paper we describe the co-design process to uncover the unemployment problem, in Cape Town, South Africa. We engage with unemployed or underemployed individuals at two different NGO sites in Cape Town. We engage, primarily with current and former students of two job readiness programmes and supplement our work with input from intermediary trainers. We outline our use of co-design under the umbrella of Participatory Design (PD) and discuss our findings, in line with the different documentations of benefits of intermediaries. Our findings highlight the benefits of working with intermediaries from the NGOs and the benefit of working with NGOs as embedded community partners. Additionally, we show that co-design can be used to successfully uncover issues around a problem such as unemployment

A Characterization of Digital Native Approaches To Mobile Privacy and Security

Despite their familiarity with the digital, so-called 'digital natives' are not tech-savvy, particularly with respect to privacy and security. In this study we characterize this problem by looking at a cohort of South African students. We employ a web-based survey of 100 students, supplemented by in-depth interviews with 10 additional students. In both cases we inquired about, and observed knowledge of permissions, encryption and application installation practices. Our findings show that most students (80%) do not look for or understand permissions or encryption, and use location-based services unsafely. Based on these results we argue that digital natives lack the technical skills and understanding to properly engage with mobile privacy and security. We further argue that this generation has been so over-exposed to mobile requests that violate their privacy and security that they have become desensitized and their definition of privacy and security has changed. Lastly, we discuss the implications of our findings for higher education institutions, policy, and mobile application design

Online Gaming for Crowd-sourcing Phrase-equivalents

We propose the use of a game with a purpose (GWAP) to facilitate crowd-sourcing of phrase-equivalents, as an alternative to expert or paid crowd-sourcing. Doodling is an online multiplayer game, in which one player (drawer), draws pictures on a shared board to get the other players (guessers) to guess the meaning behind an assigned phrase. In this paper we describe the system and results from several experiments intended to improve the quality of information generated by the play. In addition, we describe the mechanism by which we take candidate phrases generated during the games and filter out true phrase equivalents. We expect that, at scale, this game will be more cost-efficient than paid mechanisms for a similar task, and demonstrate this by comparing the productivity of an hour of game play to an equivalent crowd-sourced Amazon Mechanical Turk task to produce phrase-equivalents over one week

Video Consumption Patterns for First Time Smartphone Users: Community Health Workers in Lesotho

There is already strong evidence that mobile videos are a good vehicle for public health information dissemination, but there remain open questions around sustainability, appropriate target users, consumption patterns, content, and usage models. We analyse log and interview data of 42 community health workers (who were first time smartphone users) from a longitudinal 17-month deployment to better understand how the utility of mobile videos played out over time in rural Lesotho. During the study period, videos were viewed at an average of 170 times per month, for a total of 2898 views. Through this data we draw these primary findings: a) pausing is not contextually necessary, b) age is not a barrier to usage, c) the primary predictor of popularity of a given video is topical relevance and national campaigns, d) there is no apparent relationship between video length, popularity and completion rates, and e) new videos have only a short-lived novelty effect. Furthermore, we affirm that regular engagement with CHWs has an impact on continued usage, in addition to being important for reducing attrition due to technical issues

Characterisation of Mobile Data Usage in Township Communities

The paper describes a measurement study of mobile Internet usage in township communities in South Africa. The idea is to understand usage pattern of mobile data that would motivate the provisioning of a localised cloudlet infrastructure with an appropriate set of services

Collaborative Neighbour Monitoring in TV White Space Network

Collaborative sensing among secondary users in television white space (cognitive radio) networks can considerably increasethe probability of detecting primary or secondary users. In current collaborative sensing schemes, all collaborative secondary users are assumed to be honest; however, the deployment of such networks is susceptible to attacks by malicious users, in which malicious secondary users either report false detection results or inject falsified data in order to unduly occupy a specific channel and deny other nodes from using it. This work seeks to allow each secondary user to monitor its neighbour to ensure there is no spectrum abuse by any secondary users so as to improve spectrum fairness in dynamic spectrum access (DSA) networks

Co-designing with Mothers and Neonatal Unit Staff: Use of Technology to Support Mothers of Preterm Infants

There are several digital technologies which have been designed and successfully used to support mothers of preterm infants. However, none have been designed for application in the developing world context. For the existing interventions, none have involved mothers (who are the intended beneficiaries of these technologies) in the design process. This paper reports on a process that involved Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) staff and mothers in the design of technological interventions that focus on enhancing communication between mothers and staff in the NICU context. We used the co-design approach, focusing on identifying methods that ensure participants fully participate in the design process despite facing co-design dynamics such as power imbalances and conflict. Our results demonstrate the benefits of choosing an approach that focuses on building trust with stakeholders before delving into co-design process and empowering participants thus enabling them to fully participate in a design process. We argue that while working with multiple stakeholders, co-design readiness is dependent on methodological choice, stakeholders’ relationship with the researcher and stakeholders’ cohesion

The NICU Design Toolbox: Co-design through Empathic Relationship Building

Co-design in practice can be extremely difficult, especially when multiple stakeholders are involved. In this research, we reflect on ways to produce cooperation between low-income mothers, nurses, and doctors, as they work with researchers to co-design an artifact to alleviate communication gaps in a South African neonatal intensive care unit. We describe the strategies used to mediate and foster cooperation between these stakeholders; cooperative prototyping techniques can foster collaboration, disentangle participation and enhance participant creativity in spite of power differentials and initial feelings of disconnection. We argue for flexible, responsive design practices that foster readiness to design with other stakeholders

Towards an architectural design of a guideline-driven EMR system: A contextual inquiry of Malawi

Computerised clinical practice guidelines are a key component of effective clinical decision support systems, especially in low-resource regions such as Malawi. To address shortages in staffing and budgets for training, the practice of task-shifting, the clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) enable health workers with limited training to provide a standardised level of care. However, CPGs are tradition-ally paper-based, with only a few CPGs having been computerised for Malawi's national electronic health record system. These CPGs have been hard-coded into the system, necessitating significant additional work to add support for future and revised CPGs. We further investigate CPG computerisation challenges in order to understand the motivations for the current computerised CPGs implementation. We use semi-structured interviews, code reviews, and observations in Malawi. Most significantly, we extend existing understanding of software engineering principles to the context of low-resource environments, noting that the tensions between conflicting stakeholder requirements, deadline and deliverable expectations, and good software engineering often result in systems that are harder to maintain, further exacerbating potential problems with longevity of ICTD deployments. We further suggest that a component-based approach in conjunction with communities of open source developers might help alleviate this problem by providing more scalable and robust CPG support

Performance analysis of a collaborative DSA-based network with malicious nodes

This work analyses the performance of a Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) network with secondary nodes to provide Internet services, and studies the impact of malicious nodes and cooperative secondary nodes on the performance of the network and spectrum utilization. The work mathematically models the throughput, latency, and spectrum utilization with varying numbers of malicious nodes, secondary nodes, miss probabilities, and false alarm probabilities, and studies their effect on the performance of the network. The results point to rapid spectrum starvation as the number of malicious nodes increase, as well as the negative impact of too many secondary nodes crowding out available spectrum with resultant degradation of throughput and latenc