Browsing by Author "Tucker, William"

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    Developing locally relevant applications for rural South Africa : a telemedicine example
    (2005) Chetty, Marshini; Blake, Edwin H; Tucker, William
    Within developing countries, there is a digital divide between rural and urban areas. In order to overcome this division, we need to provide locally relevant Information and Communication Technology (ICT) services to these areas. Traditional software development methodologies are not suitable for developing software for rural and underserviced areas because they cannot take into account the unique requirements and complexities of such areas. We set out to find the most appropriate way to engineer suitable software applications for rural communities. We developed a methodological framework for creating software applications for a rural community. We critically examined the restrictions that current South African telecommunications legislation places on software development for underserviced areas. Our socially aware computing framework for creating software applications uses principles from Action Research and Participatory Design as well as best practice guidelines; it helps us address all issues affecting the project success. The validity of our framework was demonstrated by using it to create Multi-modal Telemedicine Intercommunicator (MuTI). MuTI is a prototype system for remote health consultation for a rural community. It allowed for synchronous and asynchronous communications between a clinic in one village and a hospital in the neighbouring village, nearly 20 kilometers away, in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. It used Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) combined with a store and forward approach for communication. MuTI was tested over a Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) network for several months.
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    Open Access
    Towards communication and information access for deaf people
    (South African Computer Society, 2014) Blake, Edwin; Tucker, William; Glaser, Meryl
    In tightly circumscribed communication situations an interactive system resident on a mobile device can assist Deaf people with their communication and information needs. The Deaf users considered here use South African Sign Language and information is conveyed by a collection of pre-recorded video clips and images. The system was developed according to our method of community-based co-design. We present several stages of the development as a series of case studies and highlight our experience. The first stage involved ethnographically inspired methods such as cultural probes. In the next stage we co-designed a medical consultation system that was ultimately dropped for technical reasons. A smaller system was developed for pharmaceutical dispensing and successfully implemented and tested. It now awaits deployment in an actual pharmacy. We also developed a preliminary authoring tool to tackle the problem of content generation for interactive computer literacy training. We are also working on another medical health information tool. We intend that a generic authoring tool be able to generate mobile applications for all of these scenarios. These mobile applications bridge communication gaps for Deaf people via accessible and affordable assistive technology.