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deana's research

Research and Projects

Technology that empowers, is technology with a heart!

My research lies in the space of mobile and ubiquitious computing (ubicomp), human-computer interaction and information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D). I am interested in the intersection of technology and development- technology for emerging markets and for the underserved.

Additionally, I am interested in empirical studies to understand technology use amongst transnational and cross-cultural groups of people.

water alert!

High fatality rates and poor health are major impediments to the development of a country. Every year, diarrheal diseases, mainly caused from drinking contaminated water, claim the lives of over 43,000 South Africans. This led to my decision to design a cell phone application to alert and report drinking water quality to South Africans for my Master’s thesis. This projects falls under the Aquatest project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and I received guidance from Dr. Gary Marsden at the University of Cape Town (UCT). A proposed solution had to be language independent (South Africa has 11 official languages), accessible to all literacy levels, and suitable for both consumers and advanced users such as nurses. Most people own or have access to mobile phones in South Africa and accessing the Internet over GPRS technology on a mobile phone is relatively cheap. My final design provided consumers with water quality alerts on their cell phones, as well as advice and purification techniques through the use of graphics and symbol-based messages. Additionally, it presented a complex water quality report in a simplified visual format which increased the understanding of water quality information by an average of 40% in all participants. My thesis is published and accessible here.

nettags

Nettags (networking + tagging) is one module of a corporate social networking tool project. It is based on the principles of folksonomy (collaborative tagging). Each user's profile consists of tags that describe them (skills, hobbies etc.), whether self-assigned or assigned by others. They create their own inter-company networks or 'bubble' by populating it with tags. Coworkers who are tagged with these keywords, populate the bubble and gravitate towards the center, as they have more tags in common. The goal of the tool is to improve employee relations, connect needs with skillsets and help employees to learn more about each other and their roles in the company. The tool is targeted towards mid-sized to large companies and is designed to do this without getting in the way of productivity. This was designed as part of a team project. I came up with the concept of nettags and designed the interface. We ended with an interactive prototype of the tool which also included a peoplequiz and a leaderboard which challenged employees to learn more about their colleagues.

voyager's eye

Voyager's eye is a travel site I developed for a class project primarily in PHP and mySQL. User's can read about travel, and create accounts to customize their travel pages, including RSS feeds they want to follow.