Suma Prashant

How Interface Adaptation for Physical Impairment Can Help Able Bodied Users in Situational Impairment

Systems and services developed for elderly or disabled people often find useful applications for their able-bodied counterparts—a few examples are mobile amplification control, which was originally developed for people with hearing problems but is helpful in noisy environments, audio cassette versions of books originally developed for blind people, standards of subtitling in television for deaf users and so on. In this study, we evaluate how prediction from a user model developed for physically impaired users can work in situational impairment.

The Usefulness and Feasibility of Mobile Interface in Tuberculosis Notification (MITUN) Voice Based System for Notification of Tuberculosis by Private Medical Practitioners – A Pilot Project

Introduction Tuberculosis (TB) is a notifiable disease and health care providers are required to notify every TB case to local authorities. We conducted a pilot study to determine the usefulness and feasibility of mobile interface in TB notification (MITUN) voice based system for notification of TB cases by private medical practitioners. Methodology The study was conducted during September 2013 to October 2014 in three zones of Chennai, an urban setting in South India. Private clinics wherein services are provided by single private medical practitioners were approached. The steps involved in MITUN included: Registration of the practitioners and notification of TB cases by them through voice interactions. Pre and post-intervention questionnaires were administered to collect information on TB notification practices and feasibility of MITUN after an implementation period of 6 months. Results A total of 266 private medical practitioners were approached for the study. Of them, 184 (69%) participated in the study; of whom 11 (6%) practitioners used MITUN for TB notification. Reasons for not using MITUN include lack of time, referral of patients to government facility, issues related to patient confidentiality and technical problems. Suggestions for making mobile phone based TB notification process user-friendly included reducing call duration, including only crucial questions and using missed call or SMS options. Conclusion The performance (feasibility and usefulness) of MITUN voice based system for TB notification in the present format was sub-optimal. Perceived problems, logistical and practical issues preclude scale–up of notification of TB by private practitioners.

Real-Time Biosurveillance pilot in India and Sri Lanka

The latter parts of 2007 and early months of 2008 witnessed an alarming number of deaths from Leptospriosis in Sri Lanka [1]. This disease presents with flu like symptoms, and it is not easy to identify because other more common diseases with similar symptoms tend to emerge naturally during monsoon seasons. The scattered number of characteristic patient complaints went unnoticed, during the rainy season, until a few deaths were reported by individual hospitals. An unusual number of flu-like symptoms concentrated in particular geographic areas (North Central and North Western Province in Sri Lanka) could have signaled the epidemiologists of an abnormal event. The present day paper-based disease surveillance and notification systems in Sri Lanka and India [2], confined to a set of notifiable diseases, often require 15-30 days to assemble and communicate field data, and for the central Epidemiology Unit to process it. This latency does not allow for timely detection of disease outbreaks, and it limits the ability of the health system to effectively respond and mitigate their consequences. The Real- Time Biosurveillance Program (RTBP) is a pilot aiming to introduce modern technology to health departments in Tamil Nadu, India, and Sri Lanka to complement the existing disease surveillance and notification systems. The processes involve digitizing all clinical health records and analyzing them in near real-time to detect unusual events to forewarn health workers before the diseases reach epidemic states. Health records from health facilities, namely the patient case disease, syndrome, and demographic information, are collected through the mHealthSurvey mobile phone application [3] and fed in to the T-Cube Web Interface [4], which is a browser based software tool that uses the T-Cube data structure for fast retrieval and display of large scale multivariate time series and spatial information. Interface allows the user to execute complex queries quickly and to run various types of comprehensive statistical tests on the loaded data [5] and [6]. The Sahana Messaging/Alerting Module is used to disseminate detected adverse events to targeted health officials and health workers. The Sahana Alerting module adopts the global content standard: Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) for structuring the messages that are transported via SMS, Email, and Web [7]. Evaluation of the RTBP involves a replication study and parallel cohort study. This paper discusses the technologies used in the pilot and the initial findings in relation to usability of the system. The RTBP research is made possible through a grant received from the International Development Research Center of Canada (105130).

An Exploratory study of Mobile Multimedia Agricultural Advisory System: Challenges and Lessons from Tamil Nadu, India

This paper describes the experiences gained in terms of challenges encountered and lessons learned in an exploratory initiative of mobile phone‐based multimedia agricultural advisory System (MAAS), which helps in providing timely agricultural expert advice to farmers on their mobile phone. When a farmer is calling, a call‐centre‐like interface containing personalized information of that farmer pops up at the experts end. The expert views the farmers dashboard and analyses the situation and query based advisory is provided to the farmer. This agricultural advisory system formed part of a research study under National Agricultural Innovation Projects (NAIP), New Delhi. The MAAS is developed by Indian Institute of Technology Madrass Rural Technology and Business Incubator and it was field tested with 1200 farmers in three districts of Tamil Nadu (Kancheepuram, Erode and Dharmapuri), India, during December 2010 to June 2012. The aim of this paper is to describe the experiences, highlighting a number of specific challenges and lessons associated with providing mobile based agricultural advisories to farmers in rural areas.

Agro-Market Information and Farmers' Market Linkage: Way Forward

This paper attempts to understand the information seeking behavior, market advisory preference of farmers and formulate suitable approaches for enhancing the market advisory services and suggest a few approaches, developing backward and forward linkages for farmers, for improving their profitability. Though farmers are adopting the latest crop production technologies to bring out best yield levels, the profitability is decided by the market forces only. Earlier studies have documented farmers rarely sell directly to consumers and there are significant price variations in the village markets. This information asymmetry will foster opportunistic behavior of other market actors which in turn traps farmers in vicious cycle of poverty. With a view to understand what kind of market information was most sought after by farmers and the sources from where they received this information, the authors carried out a research study in the Trichy district of Tamil Nadu, India. The results revealed that though farmers were aware of many of the sources providing market information such as the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Kissan Call Centre, etc. they primarily still sought the information from agro input dealers. The paper concludes with a note that market led extension approach with suitable ICT interventions will help the farmers in reaping better returns in a sustainable manner.

Perceptions of the use of Mobile Enabled Social Hub by rural communities in Tamil Nadu results of a survey

This paper describes the perception of rural communities in the use of Mobile Enabled Social Hub (MESH) that was field tested in several villages across Sivaganga district in the southern part of rural Tamil Nadu, India, during May 2010 to December 2010. The present study was conducted through well structured pre-tested questionnaire with 90 users who took active participation throughout the project. The survey results showed that the rural communities perceived the MESH platform favourably, in terms of its usefulness and ease of use in exchanging information within their communities. Mann-Whitney U tests confirm that gender played a significant role in the perception of MESH as a means for effective communication. The Kruskal-Wallis test analysis also substantiated that people have perceived the MESH platform in an equal way, regardless of age group, education level and type of occupation.

Exploiting Inclusive User Model for an Electronic Agriculture System

User model can be defined as a machine-readable representation of user characteristics of a system. We have developed a user model that considers users with physical, age-related or contextual impairment and can be used to personalize electronic interfaces to facilitate human machine interaction. This paper presents a case study of exploiting this Inclusive User Model to personalize an electronic agriculture application. The e-agriculture system aims to help farmers in reporting crop diseases electronically and getting help from experts. We have integrated the user model with this application so that it can be used by users with a wide range of perceptual, cognitive and motor impairment. Once users signed up to the user modeling system, their profile is carried with them regardless of the type of device they are using. The paper presents brief detail of both the user model and the e-Agriculture system along with description of a user study conducted on the system.

mASK: A functioning personalized ICT-based agriculture advisory system: Implementation, impact and new potential

While Indian agriculture contributes merely 13.9% of the countrys Gross Domestic Product, nearly 52% of the population still depends on agriculture for its livelihood. Close to half of the farmers are small farmers (owning 1.0 ha or less) facing near-stagnant productivity. This is due to several factors, but farmers often indicate that access to the right information at the right time is one of the most sought after need. Addressing this need to aid in the development of a productive and sustainable agricultural sector has certainly emerged as one of the major humanitarian challenges in India. There have been numerous efforts in this direction with the setting up of agricultural advisory systems, to provide information to farmers, but not many have succeeded in the objective of providing easily accessible, sustainable, personalized advisories to farmers. Recognizing this, the Indo-UK Advanced Technology Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, Systems and Services (IUATC), a major technology transfer initiative, supported by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in India and UK Government under the Digital Economy Theme is attempting to address the challenges in Indian agriculture through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) networks. This paper presents a functioning Agricultural Advisory System that has been built with the aim of bridging information gaps between farmers and agriculture knowledge workers (such as agricultural scientists and extension workers) and is an extension of a technology effort that has been previously presented. While our earlier work only discussed the potential of using an innovative ICT approach to providing personalized agricultural advisories, this paper covers details of the technology implementation, presents a brief summary of the impact analysis carried out with the farmers registered into our system and discusses new features that could make the system more effective.

Leveraging mobile phones for facilitating treatment adherence among patients with chronic health conditions: Implementation results with tuberculosis as case study

Early diagnosis, prompt medical care and stringent treatment adherence to the recommended treatment protocol are the three pillars of effectively managing chronic health conditions of public health importance. Complete treatment adherence is necessary for better health outcomes and it is often challenged due to myriad of factors. An innovative and inexpensive mHealth solution aimed at positively influencing treatment adherence by delivering customized services in local language has been developed. Furthermore, this solution is mobile device, internet and connectivity independent. This mHealth solution has been implemented among a group of Tuberculosis (TB) patients in South India. TB, a chronic disease with India contributing to twenty percentage of the global deaths, presents a strong case to demonstrate the applicability and usability of the discussed mHealth solution. This paper describes the solution and its implementation outcomes.