1,720,962 research outputs found
Digital health communication in South Africa during COVID-19
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On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic as the world experienced
the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) to 144 countries (World Health
Organisation, 2020a). The disease resulting from the virus – coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) – had
already overloaded the health systems of many nations. In South Africa, which confirmed its first positive
COVID-19 case on 5 March, the pandemic has resulted in extreme measures to prevent its spread, including
a national lockdown and various restrictions on movement. It has also resulted in one of the most widespread
health communication campaigns since the HIV epidemic during the 2000s.
Terms such as “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” have become part of our communal vocabulary
due to the extent of health messaging. The communication on practical preventative solutions, such as hand-
washing and alternative greeting practices (Prem et al., 2020), has also been shared widely in an easy-to-
understand manner. The WHO specifically emphasises the accurate and timely communication of essential
health information as imperative to curbing the spread of the virus, and how important such communication
is to shifting behaviours and perceptions (WHO, 2020b). In addition, accurate and authoritative information,
which inspires trust, is important in combatting the spread of the virus. This has meant innovation in digital
health communication
User-interface design and evaluation in a mobile application for detecting latent tuberculosis
Full text linkTreatment and monitoring of tuberculosis have been met with various interventions to reduce its prevalence. One such intervention, to detect and prevent latent tuberculosis infection (LTBI), is the tuberculin skin test (TST), for which an induration response on a patient’s arm is an indication of LTBI. The test requires the patient to return to a clinic 48 to 72 hours after TST administration for assessment of the response. This is a challenge because of financial and accessibility obstacles, especially in under-resourced regions. A mobile health (mHealth) application (app) has been developed for remote assessment of the response to the TST. The previous version of the LTBI screening app, however, had usability limitations. The app is intended for use by patients and healthcare workers; thus, ease of use is important. There is a lack of literature on the usability of mHealth apps, especially in under-resourced settings. In this project, the user interface of the app was redesigned and tested. The Information Systems Research (ISR) framework was integrated with design thinking for this purpose. The project included creating mock-ups of the interface which were iteratively prototyped with ten student participants, adjusted, and assessed according to the user feedback. Thereafter, the Android Studio software was used to adjust the user interface based on the insights gained through the progression of prototypes. The usability of the updated app was tested and assessed with ten healthcare workers at a community health clinic in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa. Data collection and analysis comprised both qualitative and quantitative methods. Observations, the “think aloud” approach, and the post-study system usability questionnaire were used for data collection. Student participants highlighted various usability limitations of the app during each iteration. The major usability limitations included: the complex image capture protocol, misunderstanding of instructions, and time taken to capture images. Engagement with students allowed for improvement of the app interface and enabled adequate preparation for testing in the field with end-users. Furthermore, improving the app interface before engaging with healthcare workers, enabled context specific limitations that would affect the usability of the app, to be explored during the field testing. These included safety concerns when using the app and the privacy of health information. Future work should explore how these concerns, as well as other social factors, affect usability. Furthermore, improving the image capture protocol is required for improving the usability of the app
Reconsidering priorities for digital maternal and child health: community-centered perspectives from South Africa
Full text linkEspecially 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
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Transformative Narratives: Fostering Ubuntu-Inspired Participatory Design Practices
Full text linkEmerging within the diverse tapestry of African wisdom and knowledge, Ubuntu, a philosophy of shared humanity and interconnectedness, offers exciting pathways for transforming participatory design (PD) practices in the Global South. Beyond a mere call for inclusion, Ubuntu inspires decolonial approaches and has the potential for sustainable innovation in design that resonates with local contexts. While communal and indigenous philosophies have increasingly guided decolonial PD efforts, particularly in the Global South, Ubuntu presents a unique lens for embracing both practical methods and a shift towards interconnectedness as a design ethos. This exploratory paper proposes concrete Ubuntu-guided PD techniques, leveraging storytelling and shared narratives, to cultivate a deep sense of interconnectedness within PD research. By amplifying these modes of engagement, we pave the way for alternative, “otherwise” knowledge production and participatory approaches, and future explorations of other indigenous and decolonial philosophies in PD research
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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