"The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."
Menstrual Health Education (MHE) has always been associated and identified with the menstruating sex–women. In India, where menstruation is a conversational taboo, delivering MHE to all the genders becomes challenging. At the same time, not having authentic information and inability to freely discuss taboo health topics, affects the understanding and give rise to misconceptions – adolescents are particularly vulnerable. On the one hand, menstruators are shrouded in myths and superstition, whereas non-menstruators are isolated from discourses on the subject, resulting in systemic, long-standing marginalization of women. In this project, I am working with NGOs like SachhiSaheli and HAIYYA to support, leverage and extend Information Communication Technology (ICT) for menstrual health and wellbeing in India with a focus on female menstruators.
With easy access to affordable internet-powered smartphones, developing countries are adopting smartphone applications to provide enabling services to their citizens through eHealth, eGovernance, and digital payments. The challenge is to ensure equitable access to these services by everyone, including people with semi-literacy or low-literacy who form a large part of the population in developing countries. However, extensive HCI literature has identified literacy as one of the barriers to designing user interfaces. In this work, we synthesize a framework—designing SARAL (Smartphone Applications embRAcing Low-literate users)—of actionable guidelines for designing smartphone UIs that would be usable by low-literate users. The proposed guidelines intend to support researchers, practitioners, designers, and implementers in designing and evaluating UIs of smartphone applications for people with low literacy.
The team members interact with one or many representations of our target population (e.g., house help, vegetable vendor, rickshaw driver, etc.) in our day-to-day life. We have shared experiences where we have either helped such people in using smartphone applications or have participated in discourses on the related subject. The technical training, learnings from the field, and the first-hand experience of witnessing challenges around adopting mobile applications, first during Demonetisation and now for the COVID-19 pandemic, formed our motivation to conduct the research.
In recent years, mental illness - an invisible disability - has become one of the rising causes of global health concern, as it affects society as a whole. A mental disorder causing functional impairments, limiting the patient’s one or more life activities, falls under the category of severe mental illnesses (SMIs) (e.g., bipolar disorder and schizophrenia). Given that Indian society practices the extended family system, the SMI patient is dependent on family members (informal caregivers), for the treatment, medication, and psychosocial support. An informal caregiver has to play multiple roles in lifelong management of SMIs while dealing with patient’s manic episodes, which leads to "caregiver burden" and needs help in coping with it. In this project, we are working with AIIMS Delhi , to understand the health technology usage, perceived needs, and acceptability of mHealth based interventions in patients with Schizophrenia to improve illness management and reduce caregiver burden. Our long term goal is to design, deploy, and study the feasibility and the usability of the mHealth solution for managing Schizophrenia in the cultural context of India.