Information and Communication Technologies for Development

According to our timeline, we are supposed to meet up with people from the Nokia lab this week. However, after talking to the course instructors, it was agreed that we do not have solid questions in mind and hence a meeting with Nokia will not be very useful apart from letting them know we are working with Nokia phones.

Yesterday our team had a meeting to devise the needs assessment which is one of the final deliverables of the course. A needs assessment aims to find out whether the proposed project is actually needed in the target community and if so, how it should be implemented. When we started our project, a lot of the details were already given to us and our job was more about developing the system given the background than shaping the project. As a result, when writing the needs assessment, we had to pretend not knowing about the outcome. Even so, I feel that having our decisions already made for us might have adversely affected the quality of our needs assessment. There is a risk that the questions we drafted were geared to produce the answers that would lead to the decisions that were already made. Also, the coverage of the questions may not be wide enough. For example, we have decided to use RFID bracelets and/or barcode ID card. As a result, it is easy to come up with questions that gauge what people think about using these two things but do not explore other options. Hence, we added a question that asks family members what they usually bring with them when they leave home in an attempt to find out what their habits are, and from there work out what form the RFID tag can take so that people will carry it with them most of the time.

We have drafted our first version of the needs assessment, which includes surveys for medical staff in clinics, staff in vaccination centres, family members of infants and some questions about the community in general. After revising our first draft, we hope to get some comments from Ms Hall-Clifford, who gave us a lecture on this.

The item on this week’s to do list is to finalise the bracelet design so some of us, including myself, will be looking up suitable materials and a list of materials to avoid (eg those that are known to cause allergies in infants, not suitable for prolonged skin contact in particular climates). At the same time, Adam will be focusing on writing programmes for testing.