Nurture: assisted pediatrics for indian parents

Abstract

Early detection of developmental and growth deviations enables early intervention so that children and parents suffer minimal irreversible physical and financial damage. In India however, pediatricians operate within acute time constraints that keep them from performing comprehensive developmental assessments for their patients. Parents' lack of awareness regarding growth and development milestones further hinders early detection. Our paper contributes the design and evaluation of a probe that seeks to understand the needs of variously resource-constrained middle-class parents in India for monitoring their children's growth, development, and immunization milestones. Our findings highlight the potential of mobile information-based applications to engage, assist, and empower Indian parents. In addition, we describe the affordances of a design process that originated amidst a richly resourced hackerspace organized to address the needs of under-resourced settings, and discuss the consequences of this process on our design.