Tamara Ginige

Building social life networks through mobile interfaces : the case study of Sri Lanka farmers

The development of mobile applications is paramount to support users living in developing countries to improve their lives. One of the major research challenges is to develop a user interface suitable for such users. In this chapter we present the design process we applied in order to develop a mobile application oriented to farmers living in Sri Lanka. The application prototype developed so far has been evaluated against usability requirements and a usability evaluation framework has been devised, which can be used to replicate the tests as the application iteratively reaches its final release. This work represents a pilot study within a wider international research project aiming to provide real-time information to support activities related to livelihood delivered using mobile phone applications targeted to meet the needs of people in developing countries.

Architecture for Social Life Network to Empower People at the Middle of the Pyramid

We have designed an architecture for a mobile based information system to empower people in the middle of the pyramid (MOP). MOPs is now half of the world’s population has only a mobile phone to get connected to the Internet. They need applications to enhance their livelihood activities. These applications need to provide information on rapidly changing dynamic situations such as fluctuations in market prices, prevailing supply and demand situation for their produce as well as more stable information such as information on seeds, pests, weather patterns, soil types etc. Our architecture is designed to provide dynamic information by aggregating micro-blogs, status updates and data from sensors. It also has connections to established data sources and websites to provide more stable information and tools for empowerment.

Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Achieving Sustainable Agriculture Production: A Case Study from Sri Lanka

Crop production problems are common in Sri Lanka which severely effect rural farmers, agriculture sector and the countrys economy as a whole. A deeper analysis revealed that the root cause was farmers and other stakeholders in the domain not receiving right information at the right time in the right format. Inspired by the rapid growth of mobile phone usage among farmers a mobile-based solution is sought to overcome this information gap. Farmers needed published information (quasi static) about crops, pests, diseases, land preparation, growing and harvesting methods and real-time situational information (dynamic) such as current crop production and market prices. This situational information is also needed by agriculture department, agro-chemical companies, buyers and various government agencies to ensure food security through effective supply chain planning whilst minimising waste. We developed a notion of context specific actionable information which enables user to act with least amount of further processing. User centered agriculture ontology was developed to convert published quasi static information to actionable information. We adopted empowerment theory to create empowerment-oriented farming processes to motivate farmers to act on this information and aggregated the transaction data to generate situational information. This created a holistic information flow model for agriculture domain similar to energy flow in biological ecosystems. Consequently, the initial Mobile-based Information System evolved into a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem that can predict current production situation in near real enabling government agencies to dynamically adjust the incentives offered to farmers for growing different types of crops to achieve sustainable agriculture production through crop diversification.

Interplay of Requirements Engineering and Human Computer Interaction Approaches in the Evolution of a Mobile Agriculture Information System

Very high adoption of mobile phones in developing countries can be used to empower people engaged in various sectors such as agriculture, fisheries and healthcare by providing timely information in right context, thus facilitating them to make informed decisions. Having identified lack of such information is badly affecting farmers in Sri Lanka we embarked on a project to develop a mobile based agriculture information system. We had to combine different theories and methods both from Requirements Engineering (RE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) on a need basis to successfully gather the requirements. When we retraced the process we saw a definitive systematic pattern as to how RE and HCI can be used to enrich such an artefact; highlighting the strong interplay between RE and HCI. Discovery of this pattern enabled us to generalise the process.

Design science research based blended approach for usability driven requirements gathering and application development

Extracting user requirements in designing innovative ICT based solutions for emerging vague problems is a challenge. We successfully addressed this challenge by blending several techniques in Software Engineering (SE) and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) within a Design Science Research (DSR) framework. These techniques were traditional surveys and interviews, causal analysis, scenario creation and transformation, use of paper-based and functional prototypes for communicating with users and capturing their feedback, user centered design, and incremental development. This approach enabled us to better capture requirements based on usability aspects and guided us to design a successful solution. We present a framework derived from this research for wider applicability.

Extending DSR with Sub Cycles to Develop a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem for Coordinating Agriculture Domain in Developing Countries

Still a large percentage of the world population, especially in developing countries are depending on agriculture for their livelihood. The agriculture domain in many developing countries is not well coordinated leading to over and under production of crops resulting in widely fluctuating market prices, waste and economic hardship for farmers. Rapidly growing Smartphone usage among farming community has opened new possibilities to develop a mobile based artefact to coordinate the agriculture production. We have developed an overall artefact; a Digital Knowledge Ecosystem using Design Science Research (DSR) methodology to solve this complex problem. The main project had many research challenges to solve and they were assigned to several sub-projects to address. The outputs of sub-projects created several artefacts. They were integrated to develop the overall artefact to achieve the main goal of the overall project. Managing the complexity of the overall project was a challenge. For this, we had to split three main cycles of DSR: Relevance, Design and Rigor into 6 DSR sub-cycles; Relevance – Problem Understanding and Relevance – Suitability Validation, Rigor – Learning and Rigor –Contribution, Design - Heuristic Search and Design - Functional Validation. This split enabled us to better coordinate the activities to address different aspects of the problem performed by different researchers, often in parallel at multiple geographical locations. The resulted mobile based Digital Knowledge Ecosystem initially developed for farmers in Sri Lanka is now being trialled in India and adapted to develop a Mobile based Information System for Nutrition Driven Agriculture for African Countries.

Cultivation Planning Application to Enhance Decision Making among Sri Lankan Farmers

As part of a larger project to develop a Mobile Based Information System (MBIS) to enhance livelihood activities of Sri Lankan farmers, we investigated how farmers access agricultural knowledge and apply the knowledge to do their tasks. As farmers found it difficult to access and find the required information among published knowledge currently available, crop ontology has been developed to query the factual knowledge in the context specific to a farmer. In the interviews that we conducted, we found that providing factual knowledge alone is not sufficient as farmers also lack the procedural knowledge to make use of the factual knowledge. Therefore, we developed a Cultivation Planning Application that has procedural knowledge embedded into several modules that allow farmers to perform tasks that help them in their decision making process.

Impact of information technology on delivery of education

Even though we do not have hard evidence that by using information technology (IT) we can enhance learning, there are many areas related to the delivery of education that can benefit by the use of IT. In the projects we have done, we used IT to enhance access to information, facilitate deep learning and also to provide intelligent tutoring. In each case, the feedback we had from the students has been very positive. Due to many difficulties, it is hard to quantify the benefits resulting from the use of IT for the delivery of education. In this paper we highlight some of the possible benefits at a conceptual level.