Intimate health remains a taboo subject across many cultural contexts globally, limiting opportunities for open discussion and support. HCI research has established that religious and cultural identities and values shape discussions on intimate health, yet these dimensions are rarely embedded in the design of digital health platforms. In this paper, we adopt an Islamic Feminist lens to design a virtual environment to foster conversations about intimate health among Arab Muslim women. We conducted nineteen interviews, followed by four focus groups on an avatar-based platform (Gather.town) modeled on the majlis—a traditional Arab gathering space. While interviews revealed significant barriers to discussing intimate health, focus groups demonstrated how anonymous, avatar-based interactions in a familiar and comfortable setting can support open discussions. Our research thus advances HCI research on safe digital spaces for sensitive health conversations, and offers actionable strategies for embedding feminist, culturally, and religiously resonant design into digital health platforms.

There has been a growing interest in reproductive health and intimate wellbeing in Human-Computer Interaction, increasingly from an ecological perspective. Much of this work is centered around women’s experiences across diverse settings, emphasizing men’s limited engagement and need for greater participation on these topics. Our research responds to this gap by investigating cisgender men’s experiences of cultivating sexual health literacies in an urban Indian context. We leverage media probes to stimulate focus group discussions, using popular media references on men’s fertility to elicit shared reflection. Our findings uncover the role that humor and masculinity play in shaping men’s perceptions of their sexual health and how this influences their sense of agency and participation in heterosexual intimate relationships. We further discuss how technologies might be designed to support men’s participation in these relationships as supportive partners and allies.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based technologies are increasingly being integrated into public sector programs to help with decision-support and effective distribution of constrained resources. The field of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) has begun to examine how the resultant sociotechnical systems may be designed appropriately when targeting underserved populations. We present an ethnographic study of a large-scale real-world integration of an AI system for resource allocation in a call-based maternal and child health program in India. Our findings uncover complexities around determining who benefits from the intervention, how the human-AI collaboration is managed, when intervention must take place in alignment with various priorities, and why the AI is sought, for what purpose. Our paper offers takeaways for human-centered AI integration in public health, drawing attention to the work done by the AI as actor, the work of configuring the human-AI partnership with multiple diverse stakeholders, and the work of aligning program goals for design and implementation through continual dialogue across stakeholders.

Data-driven approaches that form the foundation of advancements in machine learning (ML) are powered in large part by human infrastructures that enable the collection of large datasets. We study the movement of data through multiple stages of data processing in the context of public health in India, examining the data work performed by frontline health workers, data stewards, and ML developers. We conducted interviews with these stakeholders to understand their varied perspectives on valuing data across stages, working with data to attain this value, and challenges arising throughout. We discuss the tensions in valuing and how they might be addressed, as we emphasize the need for improved transparency and accountability when data are transformed from one stage of processing to the next.

Care workers are increasingly using digital technology in their daily lives, for monitoring, financial compensation, training, coordination, and more. State and corporate actors have invested significant resources to enable this digital shift, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, care work has remained chronically underpaid, and continues to rely on women from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds. Our paper examines how care workers carefully navigate digitization, precarity, and complex social relationships, in an attempt to care for their communities and each other. We analyze the emerging digital ecosystem for frontline health workers in India during the COVID-19 pandemic where these dynamics have been highly visible. Our research draws attention to four interconnected ways in which workers practiced care, by directing their efforts towards survival, resilience, advocacy, and/or resistance. We suggest these also as care orientations that can be adopted by researchers and practitioners, to critically reflect on and direct technology design towards enabling more caring futures, for (and with) workers and communities.

There has been growing interest in the application of AI for Social Good, motivated by scarce and unequal resources globally. We focus on the case of AI in frontline health, a Social Good domain that is increasingly a topic of significant attention. We offer a thematic discourse analysis of scientific and grey literature to identify prominent applications of AI in frontline health, motivations driving this work, stakeholders involved, and levels of engagement with the local context. We then uncover design considerations for these systems, drawing from data from three years of ethnographic fieldwork with women frontline health workers and women from marginalized communities in Delhi (India). Finally, we outline an agenda for AI systems that target Social Good, drawing from literature on HCI4D, post-development critique, and transnational feminist theory. Our paper thus offers a critical and ethnographic perspective to inform the design of AI systems that target social impact.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the transition of workflows across sectors to digital platforms. In education settings, stakeholders previously reluctant to integrate computing technology in the classroom now find themselves with little choice but to embrace it. This move to the digital brings additional challenges in underserved contexts with limited, intermittent, and shared access to mobile or computing devices and the internet. In this rapidly evolving digital landscape, we investigate how educational institutions (schools and non-profit organizations) working with underserved populations in India are managing the transition to online or remote learning. We conducted twenty remote interviews with students, teachers, and administrators from underserved contexts across India. We found that online learning efforts in this setting relied on a resilient human infrastructure comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, and non-profit organizations to help navigate and overcome the limitations of available technical infrastructure. Our research aims to articulate lessons for educational technology design in the post-COVID period, outlining areas for improvement in the design of online learning platforms in resource-constrained settings, and identifying elements of online learning that could be retained to strengthen the education system overall.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) disproportionately affects United States veterans, yet they may be reluctant to seek or engage in care. We interview 21 participants, including veterans with PTSD, clinicians who treat veterans and friends and family that support veterans through mental health ordeals. We investigate the military identity these veterans share. We explore how this may add to their reluctance in care-seeking behaviors. We also explore the roles of human and non-human intermediaries in ecologies of care and the potential for enhancing patient empowerment in current clinical treatment contexts. We discuss how military culture can be utilized in clinical care, how multiple perspectives can be leveraged to create a more holistic view of the patient, and finally, how veterans can be empowered during treatment. We conclude with recommendations for the design of sociotechnical systems that prioritize the above in support of the mental well-being of veterans with PTSD.

In this article, we present 6 cases (contained in 13 studies) variously connected with women’s health in a range of Indian contexts. Analyzing these cases, we highlight that “women’s health” is inextricably linked with extrinsic factors that also need addressing, to propose a broadened focus of “women’s wellbeing,” as defined through the lens of Martha Nussbaum’s central human capabilities . Drawing again on our cases, we discuss the importance of taking a long, holistic, and intersectional view to women’s wellbeing. Consolidating lessons learned across studies, we emphasize the potential of framing challenges around women’s health as learning problems, rather than problems of information access alone. Leveraging this perspective, we propose the use of design-based implementation research as a potential approach in identified learning ecologies, given its emphasis on long-term engagement with multiple stakeholders in the learning process. Although the empirical research we draw from took place in various Indian contexts, we conclude by arguing that key contextual characteristics may translate to other cultures and geographies as well.

Research in Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) routinely relies on and engages with the increasing penetration of smartphones and the internet. We examine the mobile, internet, and social media practices of women community health workers, for whom internet access has newly become possible. These workers are uniquely positioned at the intersections of various communities of practice---their familial units, workplaces, networks of health workers, larger communities, and the online world. However, they remain at the margins of each, on account of difference in gender, class, literacies, professional expertise, and more. Our findings unpack the legitimate peripheral participation of these workers; examining how they appropriate smartphones and the internet to move away from the peripheries to fully participate in these communities. We discuss how their activities are motivated by moves towards empowerment, digitization, and improved healthcare provision. We consider how future work might support, leverage, and extend their efforts.

We present a case for aspirations-based design by drawing on a qualitative inquiry into the lives of young girls in rural West Bengal (India). These girls form a particularly vulnerable population, coming from an area known to be susceptible to sex trafficking and crimes against women. We leverage our findings to engage with Kentaro Toyama's call for greater attention to aspirations in designing technology for development [51]. We highlight the aspirations of and for these girls and reflect on the embedded, temporal, and mutable qualities of these aspirations. Finally, we examine how an aspirations-based design approach might factor these qualities into technology design. Although our analysis draws on empirical findings from rural/suburban India, the insights derived from this research are relevant for the process of designing technologies towards fulfillment of aspirations, more generally.

There has been a growing commitment across the fields of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction for Development (HCI4D) towards investigating the design and deployment of technologies in the context of complex healthcare ecologies. We present a qualitative inquiry of one such context, as we examine the outreach practices and everyday challenges of workers at a community-based organization in Gujarat (India) that works with People Living with the Human Immuno-deficiency Virus(PLHIV). Drawing on Yosso's framework of community cultural wealth-apt for such intersectional settings-and the lens of articulation work, we describe how the workers at Vikas build and strengthen varied forms of capital to restore "old normals," or what life was like for their PLHIV clients prior to diagnoses. Finally, we propose that attention to this nature of restoration work, and the workers' engagement with diverse forms of community cultural wealth, allows us to reflect on how technologies might (or might not) be designed to impact social and affective aspects of health.

Research in the fields of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is increasingly embracing and moving across borders. While universalism in such research is widely rejected, sole focus on the "particular'' is also commonly critiqued. Kentaro Toyama unpacks this tension, calling for balance via "deliberate efforts to understand the interplay of human universals and cultural differences, and how it pertains to design.'' In this paper, one such deliberate effort, we introduce the notion of feminist solidarity---as theorized by Chandra Mohanty---for drawing connections across borders in CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. To enable contributions in these fields to cross cultures and geographies in productive ways, we draw attention to commonalities in the struggles and processes of resistance operating in different contexts of study. To do this, we present lessons learned from conducting three comparative studies in six contexts, which were located across various borders. The primary contribution of our analysis is to leverage a feminist solidarity-based approach towards extending conversations on comparative, transnational, and feminist CSCW and HCI research, design, and practice. Our focus remains on resource-constrained regions across the world, in both the Global North and South.

Researchers and practitioners engaged in global health are increasingly turning to data-driven approaches. However, the institutionalized roles and responsibilities---as well as motivations and workflows---of those involved in data collection are not well understood. To attain a deeper understanding of the practices of frontline health workers engaged in data collection, we conducted fieldwork in underserved contexts of Delhi, India. In particular, we interviewed these workers and observed their interactions with 200 households. Our analysis takes a postcolonial feminist perspective to examine how these frontline health workers navigate the multiple demands placed on them by their families, society, local residents, and health organizations. We also discuss how they practice feminist solidarity, and distill lessons for improved data collection across global health initiatives.

We conducted a field study of Mohalla Clinics in Delhi (India), drawing on Haraway's work to highlight the importance of considering disparate, partial perspectives in the ecologies of such clinics. We emphasized that inadequate attention given to patients' and health workers' perspectives, and the low preparedness of the doctors at the clinics, resulted in the clinics being unable to address the needs of target patient groups. We concluded by contributing to ongoing, important conversations in the fields of ICTD, CSCW, and HCI towards redesigning healthcare interventions, revisiting patient empowerment, and redefining the role of ASHAs as infomediaries.