Tapan is giving a talk about Designing Appropriate Computing Technologies for the Rural Developing World, he is from the University of Washington.
Here is his abstract and bio:
Globalization has seen an increase in disparity between developed and
undeveloped regions. Disproportionate access to information
technology is a symptom and a factor contributing to this disparity.
In particular, people living in the rural developing world have many
information needs that could, but are not, being met by IT.
Technology for this context must be low-cost, accessible and
appropriate given the local infrastructure, including conditions of
intermittent power and connectivity. In this talk, I describe my
experiences developing CAM - a toolkit for mobile phone data
collection for the rural developing world. Designing technologies for
an unfamiliar context requires understanding the needs and
capabilities of potential users. Drawing from the results of an
extended design study conducted with microfinance group members in
rural India (many of whom are semi-literate or illiterate), I outline
a set of user interface design guidelines for accessibility to such
users. The results of this study are used to inform the design of
CAM, a mobile phone application toolkit including support for
paper-based interaction; multimedia input and output; and
disconnected operation. I provide evidence of CAM's usability,
breadth, and real-world applicability. Regarding real-world
applicability, a CAM application for microfinance data collection is
now being used by 17 NGO (non-governmental organization) to serve
over 10000 group members in two states of India. Regarding breadth, I
list some important rural data collection applications - including
for retail supply chain tracking, agricultural monitoring and health
care - that we have implemented, or can be implemented, using the CAM
toolkit. I conclude by discussing possible topics for future work and
my long-term research vision.
Bio: Tapan S. Parikh is an Intel Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate in the
Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of
Washington. Earlier, he received a M.S. degree in Computer Science
from UW and a Sc.B. degree with Honors in Molecular Modeling from
Brown University. Tapan's research interests include human-computer
interaction (HCI), systems engineering and information and
communication technologies for development (ICTD).
This talk is interesting to me because it has great relevance to applying technology to the rural developing world, that the urban communities take for granted. How can we solve the problems in rural areas using a mobile phone solution that deals with understanding context. The first part is understanding the context through a study that he is talking about how to provide financial services to the poor using computer technology. This study was done in India. Information can be the bridge between the formal and the informal. There is a need to design a system to make it accessible to users, and geographic. How to design a user interface for rural users who are semi-literate or illiterate? There was a test with a group of users, where the group hired a person to record the data on paper and pen. Then the paper representation was then reproduced as a software prototype on a laptop. For user response, there was a wide gap for looking at the computer and how to use the mouse to move around the screen. So in his design, he used icon buttons. Users then started to gain confidence after playing around with the user interface and clicking on buttons which would output in local language audio. I found that pretty interesting that illiterate users were able to work with the system, I can't even get my parents to try to use a computer!
The second part is to actually build the system. The solution that he used was the mobile phone which has a numeric keypad, speakers and microphone, is battery-operated and low cost. The HCI research community uses paper user interfaces for prototyping and leverage affordances of paper in digital user interfaces. But these approaches have had limited impact, and rural developing world may be the killer application for paper user interfaces. He created CAM, an application toolkit for mobile phones which includes a CAM browser and CAM scripting language to interact with the forms. The phone is used to capture the audio and images from paper, and then can review it on the phone for the user. The paper form has specific images that are captured and is associated with a particular action. Here's the paper of this that he presented at UIST 2005. This paper form that has special images which is captured by the phone, reminds me of the work by Intel Research Cambridge UK that dealt with capturing concentric circles on paper (like bar codes) and those correspond to performing a particular action. This is pretty neat, then there is no need to have to deploy something like RFID tags, because this is a low cost solution, and all phones now include a camera.
So how does this work in the field? He is now explaining about how he evaluated CAM. His results showed that the users performed significantly better with audio than textual prompts. The system has been deployed in India and commercialized by Ekgaon Technologies. CAM can also be applied to other field areas like agricultural monitoring.
His future work is looking into building a toolkit on top of CAM that allows local people to build their own solutions, and provide them with the tools and application development resources. The rural development using computer technology is now a hot area in many research institutions like UC Berkeley, Princeton/UW/MSR, MSR India, MIT Media Lab (with Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop per Child).
This is very interesting work, and he mentioned this motivates students and others to work on this to contribute to solving real world problems.
On Technorati: CAM, rural, cell phone, field work, HCI
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