The paper authored by Kumar and Anderson [2] summarises the research conducted along with the Projecting Health (PH) initiative, in collaboration with a globally approved NGO, PATH, and local ASHAs in two villages of Uttar Pradesh. The objective of this initiative was to educate women about ate-natal and postpartum health care, which is otherwise hushed in public settings. Through pico projectors for public streaming and mobile phones for personal - in-house viewership, they demonstrated women's healthcare techniques and measures. Their results included an analysis of investigation about the community's role in the design of videos as an intervention to disseminate information while proposing the possibility of duplicating similar results in other areas of rural India. They delved into the role of mobile phones and technology access in the process, power dynamics in the family, and using them to aid the process, rather than characterizing it as a barrier due to the patriarchal society. All of these added to the context and the ecology of the research area.
There have been many similar studies that the related work section puts a spotlight on. This work is an extension of the research put in Mobile and Health domains, the interaction with media, adopting storytelling to impart knowledge in low literate areas, and lastly, Feminist HCI perspective [1].
The title of the paper does not communicate the aim of the research. The research is focused on mobile phones' intervention in Maternal Health Education in Rural India, not the role that mobiles may play in healthcare. The abstract talks about the dissemination of maternal health information for mothers and newborns. However, the sampling does not talk about the percentage of nursing mothers and pregnant women in the study. The research methods followed were qualitative and quantitative, in the form of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, focus group discussions with different sets of stakeholders, and a survey to study mobile phone penetration in the two villages- Khiro and Sarani. The choice of methods was optimal, and iterative coding gave rise to the themes discussed in the paper, illustrated by user quotes.
The paper does not take into account all properties of the Feminist HCI lens, which is highly relevant in this context since the lens encourages equality and the society is patriarchal. It talks about pluralism in catering to pregnant women and new mothers and their mother inlaws, husbands, and family members. Ecology is discussed when they consider the environment and media of information spread, the current usage of mobile phones. The quality of advocacy is clubbed together with ecology and participation. It is explained that the agency of women in adopting the approach is taken into account, along with their family structure. They've incorporated not just primary stakeholders but also secondary ones - local ASHAs and family members. The videos streamed to women were enacted by the locals with direction from the PH initiative, thereby adding another layer of inclusion for the target audience. The qualities of embodiment and self-disclosure are not considered, which I believe is a shortcoming of this research. Embodiment caters to a holistic approach to the topic in question, working with both the direct and indirect impacts. Questions could have been added to the existing set in the interviews to determine these consequences. Moreover, every great design as self-disclosure suggests that it reveals itself to the users, what it gives to them and what inputs it needs. In a scenario where health is of prime concern, highlighting the above should not be pardoned. Furthermore, the lens usage is not highlighted in-depth in the text. It is inferred in a few sentences towards the end, making the aim of analysis through this lens a secondary objective.
The current research is focused on the dissemination method, the role of phones, and the stakeholders' immediate responses. It does not take into account the longer run. The study should further investigate if the imparted information and know-how adopted by the women in rural India. The questions to be considered include: has there been a drop in maternal health-related complications after completing the PH initiative? What all-new practices have families adopted after the video/ movie-based information spread? To conclude, the research conducted is thorough and has excellent insights that newer research can build upon, but it does do enough justice to the Feminist HCI lens.
References
Shaowen Bardzell. 2010. Feminist HCI: taking stock and outlining an agenda for design. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1310. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753521
Neha Kumar and Richard J. Anderson. 2015. Mobile Phones for Maternal Health in Rural India. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 427–436. Retrieved January 22, 2021 from https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702258