Erick Oduor

Technology preferences and routines for sharing health information during the treatment of a chronic illness

When a patient has a chronic illness, such as heart disease or cancer, it can be challenging for distributed family members to stay aware of the patients health status. A variety of technologies are available to support health information sharing (e.g., phone, video chat, social media), yet we still do not have a detailed understanding of which technologies are preferred and what challenges people still face when sharing information with them. To explore this, we conducted a mixed-method study-involving a survey and in-depth interviews--with people about their health information sharing routines and preferences for different technologies. Regardless of physical distance between distributed family members, synchronous methods of communication afforded the opportunity to provide affective support while asynchronous methods of communication were deemed to be the least intrusive. With family members adopting certain roles during the treatment of chronic illnesses, our findings suggest the need to design tools that mediate sharing health information across distance and age gaps, with consideration to respecting patient privacy while sharing health information.

How technology supports family communication in rural, suburban, and urban kenya

Much ICTD research for sub-Saharan Africa has focused on how technology related interventions have aimed to incorporate marginalized communities towards global economic growth. Our work builds on this. We present results from an exploratory qualitative study on the family communication practices of family members who communicate both within and between rural, suburban, and urban settings in Kenya. Our findings reveal that family communication focuses on economic support, well-being, life advice, and everyday coordination of activities. We also outline social factors that affect family communication, including being an eldest child, having a widowed sibling, and having reduced access to technology because of gender, literacy, or ones financial situation. Lastly, we discuss new opportunities for technology design and articulate the challenges that designers will face if creating or deploying family communication technologies in Kenya.

Sharing Domestic Life through Long-Term Video Connections

Video chat systems such as Skype, Google+ Hangouts, and FaceTime have been widely adopted by family members and friends to connect with one another over distance. We have conducted a corpus of studies that explore how various demographics make use of such video chat systems in which this usage moves beyond the paradigm of conversational support to one in which aspects of everyday life are shared over long periods of time, sometimes in an almost passive manner. We describe and reflect on studies of long-distance couples, teenagers, and major life events, along with design research focused on new video communication systems—the Family Window, Family Portals, and Perch—that explicitly support “always-on video” for awareness and communication. Overall, our findings show that people highly value long-term video connections and have appropriated them in a number of different ways. Designers of future video communication systems need to consider: ways of supporting the sharing of everyday life rather than just conversation, providing different design solutions for different locations and situations, providing appropriate audio control and feedback, and supporting expressions of intimacy over distance.

The Frustrations and Benefits of Mobile Device Usage in the Home when Co-Present with Family Members

Mobile devices have begun to raise questions around the potential for overuse when in the presence of family or friends. As such, we conducted a diary and interview study to understand how people use mobile devices in the presence of others at home, and how this shapes their behavior and household dynamics. Results show that family members become frustrated when others do non-urgent activities on their phones in the presence of others. Yet people often guess at what others are doing because of the personal nature of mobile devices. In some cases, people developed strategies to provide a greater sense of activity awareness to combat the problem. Mobile phone usage was sometimes perceived as beneficial by providing a mechanism for needed disengagement from family members. These findings suggest several opportunities for redesigning mobile device software to mitigate emergent frustrations, and open up new opportunities for nurturing social interactions among family members.

Moving beyond talking heads to shared experiences: the future of personal video communication

This workshop explores the future of personal video communications where systems and designs move beyond supporting conversations to a new design paradigm consisting of shared activities and experiences between distance-separated family and friends.

Family communication in rural and slum regions of Kenya

We report the findings of a small scale exploratory qualitative study on 13 participants from rural and slum regions of Kenya communicated with remote family members using technology. We focus on communication practices that enabled family members to support economic sustenance activities and also investigate the social aspects of using technology to provide or receive moral, emotional or other forms of support from distributed family members.

Mobile payment systems in North America: user challenges & successes

As smartphones continue to increase in popularity in North America so too does the opportunity to expand their use and functionality. Our study looks at one of these new opportunities, Mobile Payment Services (MPS). This study investigates user behaviors, motivations and first impressions of MPS in Canada and the USA through interviews with veteran users and interviews and diaries with new users. Participants used a variety of MPS, including: Google Wallet, Amazon Payments, LevelUp, Square and company apps geared towards payments (e.g., Starbucks). Our preliminary findings are presented as user successes and challenges.

Practices and Technology Needs of a Network of Farmers in Tharaka Nithi, Kenya

Farmers in rural areas of Kenya generally rely on traditional agricultural practices inherited from past generations. However, population increases and climate changes have put pressure on resources such as land and water. These resource pressures have created a need to broaden and expand farming practices. We conducted an exploratory study with farmers in Tharaka Nithi, Kenya to explore their practices, if and how they used ICT, and how the technologies used might be designed to aid their practices, if at all. Overall, our results show that farmers desired more knowledge to enable them apply ICT interventions in ways that improved yields. Farmers were also interested in accessing information on soil fertility, water predictability and market opportunities. These findings suggest opportunities for technology design to support farming practices among rural communities in rural settings. We also articulate social challenges that designers will face when thinking about coming up with such solutions.

Asset-Based Lending via a Secure Distributed Platform

The advent of mobile money in Kenya has accelerated the development and deployment of financial inclusion products for the previously unbanked or underbanked population. However, the focus on cash loans to individuals has not been directly matched with an increase in lending to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) that operate in the informal economy. For the majority of SMEs in Kenya and Sub-Saharan Africa access to lending products as a business remains limited due to high cost associated with risk uncertainty, lack of appraisable collateral, and incompatible loan size. This has resulted in Sub-Saharan Africa having the lowest lending utilizations for SMEs worldwide. In this note we describe a distributed platform aimed at easing the offering of financial products to SMEs by integrating stakeholders in the retail trade sector in Kenya. The note covers the framework of the system and the design criteria used to develop the technology including the utilization of a blockchain backend built on hyperledger fabric and mobile phone applications for stakeholders to engage with system. Lastly, we describe the intended usage and pilot study for deployment and testing of the technology platform.

Harsh brakes at potholes in Nairobi: Context-based driver behavior in developing cities

Driving in developing cities presents numerous challenges. Traffic congestion and traffic accidents are the most visible challenges which are caused by different underlying factors. Two chief factors are poorly planned and maintained roadway infrastructure and the decisions made by the drivers. Drivers are constantly forced to negotiate road hazards, like potholes, unlabeled speed bumps as well as moving obstacles, like pushcarts, motorcycles, and animals. Current Usage Based Insurance (UBI) models do not include the context which in many cities may be paramount to understanding driver behavior. This article presents the Context-based Driver Score (CDS) model as a unified model for scoring a driver based on a unique formulation of context that includes road quality. We demonstrate the CDS model on a real-world use case in Nairobi, Kenya, where waste-collection trucks were instrumented with smartphones in order to collect inertial and telematic data. We present an analysis of the CDS model and driver behaviors in contexts that include weather, time-of-day, and road quality. Our results show that the distribution of driving behaviors, like harsh braking and swerving, vary greatly based on the context and the definition of the CDS model. Ultimately, this work aims to extend the utility and scalability of UBI models in order to make them more suitable for deployment in developing cities.