Mobile communication tools for a South African deaf patient in a pharmacy context

Mobile communication tools for a South African deaf patient in a pharmacy context

Chininthorn, P.
Glaser, M.
Freudenthal, A.
Tucker, W.D.

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2012-12-31

This paper presents a case of iterative community-based co-design to facilitate the emergence of an innovative mobile system to address a potentially life-threatening scenario for Deaf people in South Africa. For Deaf people who communicate in South African Sign Language, miscommunication due to language barriers, under-education and under-employment can lead to a potentially dangerous therapeutic outcome when Deaf people misunderstand a pharmacist's instructions on how to take prescribed medicine. The design for a mobile communication aid to address this problem emerged from iterative cycles of action research performed with a local Deaf community that also involved pharmacists and a multi-disciplinary research team. Conventional user-centred design techniques were innovatively appropriated for the community-based co-design. The paper illustrates the community-based co-design process and points the way toward imminent implementation, as well as the potential application of the mobile solution to other scenarios in Deaf people's lives.

eHealth & health information systems, ICT for eInclusion and eAccessibility, transformation of research results into local innovation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:2786a89b-62bf-4198-95e8-038bad8774ba

IIMC International Information Management Corporation

978-1-905824-34-2

IST-Africa 2012 Conference Proceedings, (183)2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 Chininthorn, P., Glaser, M., Freudenthal, A., Tucker, W.D. and IST Africa