As Pakistan’s population ages and traditional care structures evolve, there is increasing interest in technological solutions for supporting older adults at home. This study investigates the potential of social assistive robots (SARs) in Pakistani homes, focusing on cultural values, inter-generational living, and limited access to such technologies. In a 3-day mixed-methods home study, 14 older adults interacted with a SAR communicating in Urdu. Through observations, interviews, and questionnaires, we evaluated the robot’s acceptability, engagement, and cultural compatibility. The results highlighted the need for culturally sensitive design, emphasising the role of robots as companions rather than replacements for human care, and the importance of robot’s ability to communicate in Urdu. We discuss how SARs could be designed to reflect the characteristics of Pakistani households, including faith, family values, everyday routines, and environmental factors. Our design considerations can benefit research on deploying SARs to support older adults in Pakistan and similar cultures.

Abstract Technological artifacts designed by individuals from developing nations often do not flourish in developing regions. Many authors conducting work in these regions have therefore called on researchers to make use of co-design in order to mitigate power imbalances, include the voices of communities in the design of technology intended for them, and design and build more contextually situated technology. Many of these authors also refer to the need for co-design readiness in their work. However, little is known about how co-design readiness can be articulated and achieved, especially when working with rural communities. In this paper, we make use of qualitative meta-analysis to interrogate the data from three distinct case studies in order to investigate co-design readiness. We found that co-design readiness comprises three forms, namely: (1) emotional readiness built through trust, relationship building, and empathy; (2) cultural readiness, which requires that researchers and participants have an awareness and respect for each other’s cultural values and beliefs; and, finally, (3) readiness in terms of confidence and familiarity with the technologies used which can be achieved through careful and strategic methodological decisions. We found that researchers should explicitly plan for readiness and should not assume that readiness will grow organically and that co-design, if planned well is a lengthy process. Finally, we provide learnings from our work to how co-design readiness can be achieved through planning and methodological decisions.

Reproductive well-being education in the Global South is often challenged as many communities perceive many of its contents as misinformation, misconceptions, and language-inappropriate.Our ten-month-long ethnographic study (n=41) investigated the impact of sociocultural landscape, cultural beliefs, and healthcare infrastructure on Bangladeshi people's access to quality reproductive healthcare and set four design goals: combating misinformation, including culturally appropriate language, professionals' accountable moderation, and promoting users' democratic participation.Building on the model of 'Distributive Justice,' we designed and evaluated 'Socheton, ' a culturally appropriate AI-mediated tool for reproductive well-being that includes healthcare professionals, AIlanguage teachers, and community members to moderate and run the activity-based platform.Our user study (n=28) revealed that only combating misinformation and language inappropriateness may still leave the community with a conservative mob culture and patronize reproductive care-seeking.This guides well-being HCI design toward being culturally appropriate in the context of reproductive justice with sensitive marginalized communities. CCS Concepts• Human-

As robots are increasingly becoming part of daily life worldwide, it is important to ensure that they are inclusive and culturally sensitive to accommodate users from different backgrounds. In particular, many countries in the Global South (GS) have yet to explore the integration and benefits of robots, especially for underrepresented language groups such as Urdu. We present an exploratory mixed-methods study that investigates how robots' language affects the social interaction, acceptability and overall perception of robots within Pakistani Urdu-speaking individuals. The findings highlight the importance of language and cultural adaptation, and how these factors influence the acceptance of robots, emphasising the need for more inclusive and religion sensitive technologies designed for the GS users.

Abstract Pregnant women in the Global South face significant challenges due to lack of resources and informational gaps. In this paper, we take an assets-based lens to examine the experiences of pregnant women in a low-resource setting in Ghana, focusing on the role of information and technology in prenatal care. Through interviews and co-design workshops, we sought to understand the perspectives of multiple stakeholders including pregnant women, their family members, and healthcare professionals. We highlight the complexities involved in making decisions during pregnancy, including the challenges arising from the tensions between traditional healthcare practices and modern Western health services. We discuss opportunities in digital maternal health where we argue for the importance of attending to local needs and values and advocate for recognising community strengths and integrating rural care practices as valuable assets in prenatal intervention design. Our work aims to bridge some of the gaps between the theoretical understanding of digital health and the practical realities of prenatal care in low-resource settings.

Abstract This paper explores household preferences for visualizing consumption data and investigates the potential of data physicalizations to enhance user engagement and promote sustainable practices within households. We conducted semi-structured interviews with thirteen households, utilizing a combination of images and low-fidelity prototypes to gain insights into participants’ preferences, ideas and feedback on visualizing consumption information. We requested participants to discuss an object in their home that symbolizes sustainability. The results revealed different emotional responses, from empathy to repulsion, triggered by different visual representations. Our findings also identified certain physical objects and locations within the household that play a role in fostering family collaboration towards sustainable practices. Participants preferred having a physical representation of their consumption data within their homes over a screen-based display. In light of these findings, we open space to consider designing physicalizations that encourage collaboration, enhance user engagement and motivate households to reduce their consumption.

Message-based health information dissemination systems can potentially improve maternal and child health (MCH). By conveying health information to parents, SMS- and chatbot-based systems can support parents’ learning and empower them to make better health decisions for their children. However, there is limited design advice for creating message-based dissemination systems for MCH. To help address this gap, we conducted 14 participatory workshops with 42 parents from Portugal and South Africa, exploring how parents learned to care for their children’s health. Our findings showed how parents reflected on the health advice they received, by assessing the fit of the advice to their child’s characteristics, their values and beliefs, the advice’s feasibility, or the intention and competence of the advice giver. Based on these insights, we propose four design implications for creating message-based health information dissemination systems tailored to parents and their children.

Most people with a visual impairment retain some residual vision, yet accessibility strategies and research for visual art focus on non-visual aids and strategies. Little is known about how image enhancements may benefit people with low vision in art settings. Our study explored the challenges of people with visual impairments in museums and art galleries and the potential of visual enhancements to improve accessibility. Through online focus groups with 18 participants, we uncovered multifaceted visual challenges. Participants emphasised the role of non-visual senses to reduce visual ambiguities. Subsequently, we presented participants with the concept of image enhancements on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) as a potential approach to enhance visual accessibility. Participants expressed nuanced perspectives, advocating for this technology to improve visual art. The findings provide valuable insights for enhancing the visual experience of people with low vision in museums and galleries through design.

Complementary feeding is crucial to promote healthy nutrition in infant and young children (IYC) and prevent malnutrition. Mothers, families, and healthcare professionals (HCPs) are crucial in helping IYC develop healthy eating habits. However, limited access to adequate nutritional information and health services impacts children’s nutrition, especially in low-resource settings. Technology opens up opportunities to address these challenges and potentially improve IYC feeding practices. Taking a co-design approach, we conducted low-fidelity prototyping workshops with caregivers and HCPs to explore the potential of tangible interfaces to facilitate play and promote healthy nutrition for IYC in two low-resource healthcare settings in Peru. Participants envisioned diverse tangible objects and interactions that could augment the waiting spaces of the healthcare centres, encouraging play and enhancing children’s and caregivers’ experiences, while promoting healthy nutrition and dietary diversity. We outline design opportunities to facilitate tangible play, shared playful experiences, and promote healthy nutrition in low-resource healthcare settings.

Although household consumption contributes to climate change, it can be challenging to comprehend the consequences and effects from a personal perspective. In this paper, we explore the design of physical data visualisations to promote sustainable practices within households. We conducted 15 household design workshops involving household members to explore physical designs and envision the potential use of physical artefacts in the home to promote sustainability behaviours using five low to medium-fidelity prototypes. The findings from these workshops highlight the need to balance aesthetics, abstraction, and the presentation of actionable information in the design of physical artefacts. Based on our findings, we identify key design considerations for future design: (1) including all household members in the design process to reflect the collective goals and values of the home, fostering a sense of ownership and engagement, (2) considering child-friendly design in physical artefacts to promote awareness, education, engagement, and sustainable values in children, (3) and considering nature-based visuals to reduce the mental burden of information overload.

Public deliberations are often a staple ingredient in community decision-making. However, traditional, time-constrained, in-person debates can become highly polarized, eroding trust in authorities, and leaving the community divided. This is the case in redistricting deliberations for public school zoning. Seeking alternative ways of support, we evaluated the potential introduction of an online platform that combines multiple streams of data, visualizes school attendance boundaries, and enables the manipulation of representations of land parcels. To capture multiple stakeholders' values about the potential to enhance public engagement in school rezoning decision-making through an online platform, we conducted interviews with 12 participants with previous experiences in traditional, in-person deliberations. Insights from the interviews highlight the several roles an online platform could take, especially as it provides alternative means of participation (online, synchronous, and asynchronous). Additionally, we discuss the potential for technology to increase the visibility and participation of multiple community actors in public deliberations and present implications for the design of future tools to support public decision-making.

Mobile devices, including activity trackers and smartwatches, can help older adults monitor health parameters passively and unobtrusively. Most user interactions with small devices consist of brief glances at the time or notifications. Consuming information from small displays poses challenges, which have been seldom studied from the perspective of older users. In this paper, we worked with older adults towards creating health data visualizations for them for small devices. We conducted a mixed-methods study with 30 older adults, in which we (1) conducted group discussions to understand participants’ opinions, (2) measured times taken to interpret health data visualizations with and without progress information, (3) measured how much information they could manage to see during brief glances. When data was visualized without progress indicators, participants took less time to understand the data and made fewer errors. Participants preferred health data visualizations that featured peaceful, and positive pictorial representations. We present design opportunities for older adults’ data visualizations in small devices.

Understanding household practices, beliefs, relationships among the members, and their preferences are often overlooked in the design of home-based interventions aiming to reduce consumption. We conducted a survey in the United Kingdom (22 responses) and a follow-up interview with 13 households to inform the design of interventions for reducing household consumption by: 1) understanding household consumption practices, and 2) identifying the concerns and challenges for household engagement with sustainability practices. Our findings highlight how the perspectives, understanding, and motives for consumption reduction actively shape household practices and their attempts to curtail consumption. Existing non-negotiable practices led to additional household consumption and we found different strategies households use to reach a shared-decision on food and energy use. Based on our findings, we provide opportunities for motivating and fostering engagement with sustainable practices at home.

New robotics applications require robots to complete tasks in social spaces (i.e. environments shared with people), thus arising the necessity of enabling robots to operate in a socially acceptable manner. Some social spaces tend to be large and crowded (e.g. museums, shopping malls), which require robots to move around while showing appropriate social behaviors (e.g. not interfering with human's comfortable areas). Moving under such conditions is generally called social robot navigation, and there are different approaches to do so. Nonetheless, current approaches are mostly limited to navigate large and outdoor spaces, where both robots and people can easily avoid each other. Other approaches have been tested in indoor environments, however, the test environments tend to be small and largely empty. In this paper, we present an online social robot navigation framework, which allow robots to navigate indoor, large and crowded environments, while showing social behaviors. Our framework consists of 3 modules: 1) world modeling that incorporates a novel Social Heatmap (SH) to represent crowded areas, 2) multilayered path planning that uses sampling-based approaches, and 3) path following control. We extensively benchmark our approach against state-of-the-art approaches in challenging simulated scenarios, and$w$e also demonstrate its feasibility with the Pepper robot in real-world trials.

Especially in developing regions, parents are rarely given a direct voice in the design of digital maternal and child health (MCH) interventions. Instead, MCH needs and requirements are driven by organizations and health workers. In this research, we engage with both rural and urban parents and community leaders to better understand their challenges and priorities for digital MCH and propose a parent-centered agenda for human-computer interaction research. This paper reports on the community-based, digital MCH priorities identified in our research, and describes how we approached community discourse and co-design of digital initiatives for these priorities, through parent-centered workshops with low-resource South African communities. Furthermore, we provide the parent-centered design opportunities and tensions we discovered for digital MCH in South African contexts, such as designing for local contexts and languages, designing for accessibility and connectedness, and highlighting the underdeveloped digital MCH niches. Finally, we highlight the importance of including facilitators for co-design workshops, such as using intermediaries and design cards.

Behavior change and improving health literacy based on normative ideals of motherhood is a dominant paradigm to address maternal health challenges. However, these ideals often remove women's control over their bodies overlooking how the bodily experiences of pregnancy are socially and culturally constructed. We report on 27 interviews with pregnant women and nursing mothers in rural and semi-urban areas of South India, and six focus groups with 23 frontline health workers as secondary data. We explore how the embodied pregnancy experiences are influenced and negotiated by the socio-cultural context and existing care infrastructures. Our findings highlight how the ways of seeing, knowing, and caring for a body of a pregnant woman through often conflicting norms, beliefs and practices of medicine, nourishment and care actively shape the experiences of pregnancy. We open up a space for novel opportunities for digital health technologies to enhance women's embodied experiences and pregnancy care infrastructures in the Global South.

People with food hypersensitivities experience adverse reactions when eating certain foods and thus need to adapt their diet. When dining out, the challenge is greater as people entrust the care of their allergy, intolerance, or celiac disease, in the hands of staff who might not have enough knowledge to appropriately care for them. This interview study explored how people with food hypersensitivities avoid reactions while eating out, to inspire future digital technology design. Our findings show the social and emotional impact of food hypersensitivities and how people practically cope by investigating restaurants’ safety precautions, correcting orders, or even educating restaurants’ staff. We discuss our findings against the experiences of other people living with chronic conditions and offer design opportunities for digital technologies to enhance dining out experiences of people with food hypersensitivities.

research-article Open AccessPoster: Lessons from Doing Fieldwork with Bandwidth-constrained communities Online Share on Authors: Sarina Till University of Cape Town and Independent Institute of Education, South Africa University of Cape Town and Independent Institute of Education, South AfricaView Profile , Melissa Densmore University of Cape Town, South Africa University of Cape Town, South AfricaView Profile , Toshka Lauren Coleman University of Cape Town, South Africa University of Cape Town, South AfricaView Profile , Nervo Verdezoto Dias Cardiff University, South Africa Cardiff University, South AfricaView Profile Authors Info & Claims COMPASS '21: ACM SIGCAS Conference on Computing and Sustainable SocietiesJune 2021 Pages 445–448https://doi.org/10.1145/3460112.3471979Online:23 September 2021Publication History 0citation50DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads50Last 12 Months50Last 6 weeks20 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

Frontline health workers are the first and often the only access point to basic health care services in low-and-middle income countries. However, the work and the issues frontline health workers face are often invisible to the healthcare system, with limited resources to assist them. This study explores the work practices, challenges and roles of frontline health workers in community health with particular focus on pregnancy care in South India. Drawing on the notion of maintenance and articulation work, we describe the maintenance work of frontline health workers maintaining, anticipating, reconciling, and supporting care infrastructures beyond data collection practices. Our findings highlight how socio-cultural practices, perceptions, status, and existing systems influence maintenance work practices. Based on our findings, we suggest moving beyond the focus on training and performance to design CSCW tools to support the maintenance work of frontline health workers as 'system-builders' to make healthcare infrastructures work in community health.

Besides the efforts of the Ecuadorian government in the last decade to improve the healthcare infrastructure, it still falls short to meet the healthcare needs of its population and remains far away from providing equal access to healthcare services. Based on a visit to an itinerant health point in a rural community and research conducted in public and private hospitals, this paper presents a number of infrastructural challenges that impact the everyday caring experiences of patients and healthcare professional's work practices. Reflecting on these challenges, we discuss some opportunities for future design of digital health tools and services in the Ecuadorian context.

Recent studies call for attention to the relevant work that non-clinical personnel do, not only to support clinical work, but also to the overall healthcare information infrastructure. Based on a case study of orderlies work in a major university hospital, we further investigate and characterize orderlies work with particular focus on handover situations as these support the collaboration and continuous coverage of hospital work practices. The case study involves interviews with orderlies and clinicians and a pilot study of a task management application. Based on our findings, we describe three different types of handovers (clinical to non-clinical, non-clinical to clinical, and intra non-clinical), and highlight the challenges that arise during the main tasks with handovers situations: patient transport and patient mobilization. We discuss the importance of establishing and sustaining a common ground, supporting the alignment of tasks and negotiations, as well as enhancing the patient contact within and among clinical and non-clinical personnel. We also present a couple of design recommendations to account for these challenges and handover types in the design of handover tools to support orderlies work practices.

When designing interactive web applications and services, understanding the situated nature of interaction and investigating technology appropriation experiences in the context of real-world use deserve special attention. In this paper, we report on experiences with technology appropriation of an e-Deliberation platform that we designed to support collaborative interpretation in an art gallery. Our qualitative study is based on interviews with 23 participants to explore a) visitors' practices when commenting on and interpreting art and b) how these practices are shaped by interaction with an e-Deliberation platform for collaborative writing that imposes strict regulations. An analysis of 12 hours of interview data yielded two particular appropriation practices related to the demand to satisfy additional visitors' communication needs, such as exchanging their ideas and thoughts face-to-face before writing an interpretation. Although the designers anticipated these specific needs, users also appropriated the e-Deliberation platform in unanticipated ways. These practices lead to a better understanding of the situated nature of ex-situ interaction when using interactive web applications to support remote collaboration in the art gallery context.

The cooperative, invisible non-clinical work of hospital orderlies is often overlooked. It consists foremost of transferring patients between hospital departments. As the overall efficiency of the hospital is highly dependent on the coordination of the work of orderlies, this study investigates the coordination changes in orderlies' work practices in connection to the implementation of a workflow application at the hospital. By applying a mixed methods approach (both qualitative and quantitative studies), this paper calls for attention to the changes in orderlies' coordination activities while moving from a manual and centralized form to a semi-automatic and decentralized approach after the introduction of the workflow application. We highlight a set of cross-boundary (spatial and organizational) information-sharing breakdowns and the challenges of orderlies in maintaining local and global coordination. We also present design recommendations for future design of coordination tools to support orderlies' work practices.

Addressing human impact on the environment by focusing on shared everyday practices, rather than just individual behavior is an approach that shows promise. However, it can be challenging to put this approach into concrete use, especially in teams unfamiliar with the practice orientation. To support the practice approach, we introduce the Contextual Wheel of Practice (COWOP), a framework that can: 1) help researchers and designers to better understand practices, 2) design effective interventions, and 3) facilitate collaboration between team members from different disciplines, who may not be familiar with the practice orientation. We describe how COWOP was developed, and our experiences using COWOP in three different cases. We then position COWOP as part of the "turn to practice" in HCI, and discuss how it can be useful to HCI researchers and be applied in domains beyond sustainability, such as healthcare and privacy.

Many studies show that self-care technologies can support patients with chronic conditions and their carers in understanding the ill body and increasing control of their condition. However, many of these studies have largely privileged a medical perspective and thus overlooked how patients and carers integrate self-care into their daily lives and mediate their conditions through technology. In this review, we focus on how patients and carers use and experience self-care technology through a Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) lens. We analyse studies of self-care published in key HCI journals and conferences using the Grounded Theory Literature Review (GTLR) method and identify research trends and design tensions. We then draw out opportunities for advancing HCI research in self-care, namely, focusing further on patients' everyday life experience, considering existing collaborations in self-care, and increasing the influence on medical research and practice around self-care technology.

Monitoring of health parameters in non-clinical settings is one strategy to address the increasingly aging population and age-related disabilities and diseases. However, challenges exist when introducing self-monitoring activities in people's everyday life. An active lifestyle can challenge the appropriation of healthcare technologies and people with comorbidity may have diverse but co-existing monitoring needs. In this paper, we seek to understand home-based health monitoring practices to better design and integrate them into people's everyday life. We perform an analysis of socio-technical complexities in home-based healthcare technologies through three case studies of self-monitoring: 1) pre-eclampsia (i.e. pregnancy poisoning), 2) heart conditions, and 3) preventive care. Through the analysis seven themes emerged (people, resources, places, routines, knowledge, control and motivation) that can facilitate the understanding of home-based healthcare activities. We present three modes of self-monitoring use and provide a set of design recommendations for future Ubicomp designs of home-based healthcare technology.