While the growth of financial technologies (FinTech) is making the flow of money faster, easier, and more secure, such technologies are often unable to serve many countries due to the global political environment. Despite its severe impact, this issue has remained understudied in the HCI literature. We address this gap by presenting our findings from a three-month-long ethnography with the Iranian community in Toronto, Canada. We present their struggles in transferring money to and from their home country - a process that entails financial loss, fear, uncertainty, and privacy breaches. We also outline the informal workarounds that allow this community to circumvent these challenges, along with the associated hassles. This paper contributes to broadening the scope of FinTech in the HCI literature by connecting it with the politics surrounding transnational transactions. We discuss the design implications of our findings and their contribution to the broader interests of HCI in mobilities and social justice.

In this paper, we present an interactive multimedia environment that can be used to effectively complement the role of a therapist in the process of rehabilitation for disabled children. We use Microsoft Kinect 3D depth sensing camera with the online Second Life virtual world to record rehabilitation exercises performed by a physiotherapist or a disabled child. The exercise session can be played synchronously in Second Life. The physical activities of the users are synchronized with their virtual counterparts in the Second Life. The exercises can be recorded as well and made available for downloading to facilitate offline playback. A disabled child can follow the exercise at home in the absence of the therapist, since the system can provide visual guidance for performing the exercise in the right manner. Using the proposed system, parents at home can also assist the disabled child in performing therapy sessions in the absence of a therapist. Following the suggestions of therapists, the developed prototype can track several gestures of children who have mobility problems. Using a single Kinect device, we can capture high resolution joint movement of the body, without the need for any complicated hardware set up. The initial joint-based angular measurements show promising potential of our prototype to be deployed in real physiotherapy sessions.