MobileActive.org

Access to basic health  service is limited in rural areas of Bangladesh, where 80% of the total population lives. For instance, 35% of doctors and 30% of nurses are located in four metropolitan districts where only 14.5% of the population lives. Most of the rural people are physically remote from the qualified health care providers. Two major mobile phone service providers in Bangladesh have initiated mobile health care help line service s nationwide as a remedy in this case. Since there is much hope of mobile phones to be used for basic health care services for populations living in rural areas, this research aims to evaluate how far such interventions reached  for the improvement of health care in those communities. Through an interpretive case-based research strategy, our field studies uncover enthusiasm from the rural people towards availing health help line services and the intervention's contribution to improved health-seeking behavior.

The aim of this master’s thesis is to identify design challenges and opportunities for mobile based community communication services for marginalized communities belonging to Indian urban slums.

The thesis is based on two ethnographic field studies done in urban slums of India and it is grounded in the conceptual frameworks of Community Informatics, Communicative Ecology and Communities of Practices. This qualitative research is best identified as participatory bottom-up exploration.

In the context of Indian urban slums, this thesis discusses the existing practices of mobile phone's use, identifies the 'Human Nodes' of community communication, presents design opportunities and challenges for community communication services, and proposes a design concept called 'Asynchronous Voice based Community Communication Service'.

In this paper we present a study comparing speech and dialed input voice user interfaces for farmers in Gujarat, India. We ran a controlled, between-subjects experiment with 45 participants. We found that the task completion rates were significantly higher with dialed input, particularly for subjects under age 30 and those with less than an eighth grade education. Additionally, participants using dialed input demonstrated a significantly greater performance improvement from the first to final task, and reported less difficulty providing input to the system.