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Background: Diabetes Mellitus is a global public health problem with morbidity due to complications caused by macrovascular and microvascular disease. Platelet parameters like Mean Platelet Volume (MPV) and Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) are related to platelet size, enzymatic activity and prothrombotic potential. These parameters can be obtained from routine hemogram reports of automated hematology analyzers at a relatively low cost. Fasting blood glucose, postprandial blood glucose, and hemoglobin A1C (HbA1c) are widely used to monitor glycaemic control in patients with DM. The aim of this study is to study Platelet parameters- Mean Platelet Volume (MPV) and Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) in type 2 diabetes and its predictive role in diabetic angiopathies. Methods: The present study was a Case control study carried for a period of 2 months. Statistical analysis was done with appropriate tests. Result: MPV values were lower in cases than controls. In controls, MPV shows a negative correlation with fasting blood sugar while in cases it shows a positive correlation with fasting blood sugar. MPV showed no association with HbA1c. PDW was high in cases than controls. In controls, negative correlation between PDW and FBS was observed, while in cases, a positive correlation was observed. A strong association between PDW and HbA1c was noted. At a cut off of 9.5 fL, MPV had a sensitivity of 78.33%, specificity of 70% and a positive predictive value of 72.30%. At a cut off of 15fL, PDW showed a sensitivity of 81.66%, specificity of 91.66% and a positive predictive value of 90.74%. Conclusion: The present study shows strong association between PDW and HbA1c and so it can be used as an indicator of impending vascular events. Of all the platelet parameters obtained by haematology cell counters, Platelet count is only widely used as investigative tool. Platelet indices can be used as simple and cost effective bio markers for predicting diabetic vascular complications.

High and persistent child malnutrition levels with tardy reduction, seen in successive health surveys, continue to be a matter of concern in India, drawing attention to the need to revamp the four-decade-old Government program, Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). ICDS field functionaries or Anganwadi Workers’ (AWWs) capacity deficit was identified as a significant factor affecting ICDS’s effectiveness. Considering rising numbers, over 1.4 million AWWs, and continuously advancing knowledge of community healthcare, conventional training pedagogy is ineffective in building and updating AWWs and their supervisors’ capacity, which calls for rethinking, using the ICT approach. Over 6 lakh AWWs in India were smartphone equipped by 2020. An android based quiz app was designed, following AWWs training modules’ content and need assessment results. The study investigates the quiz app’s effectiveness and compares it with conventional classroom instruction, with a group of AWWs, and discusses ways to make it an adequate substitute.

In this paper we present our study (n = 30) to gauge the effect of hand-dominance on Fitts’ throughput through four test cases—forefingers and thumbs of dominant and non-dominant hands in tapping tasks for touch-based mobile interfaces. We set out with the expectation that throughput for a dominant digit would exceed that for the corresponding digit of the other hand. We reveal that this was followed in the case of right-handed users for both forefingers and thumbs, and in case of forefingers for all users. Right-handed users had higher throughput for dominant digits (mean = 5.608) than non-dominant digits (mean = 4.736). All users had higher throughput for dominant forefingers (mean = 6.081) than non-dominant forefingers (mean = 5.436). However, surprisingly, left-handed users showed a higher throughput for non-dominant thumbs (mean = 6.078) than dominant thumbs (mean = 5.721). Throughputs of forefingers and thumbs were not significantly different for any groups.

Parental engagement in their children’s education is known to be an important predictor of children’s academic success. However, adults with less education (ALEs) in developing countries face several challenges in supporting their children at home, particularly after the children reach middle school. This research aims to facilitate parental engagement through an intervention in the Indian context. We first conducted user studies with 113 ALE parents to understand the dynamics of parental engagement. We learned that though many ALE parents invest heavily from their limited resources so that they can send their children to paid tuition classes, otherwise they lack time, resources and self-efficacy to get better engaged with their children’s education. Based on these insights, and with the help of a school teacher, we came up with four hyper-local video prototypes - we call these “explainer video”, “guider video”, “discussion video” and “homework video”. We sent these videos over WhatsApp to 12 ALE parents in Pune, India and followed up with them for two weeks. We found that parents of “better-performing” students perceived the videos to be useful and tended to watch more videos whereas parents of “not-so-well-performing” students required additional mediation and triggers. An important learning was that interventions need to help parents and children develop an academic culture at home. Overall, these videos made parents aware about their children’s educational activities and helped them get better engaged with their education.

Using an etic lens, this study deals with identifying and deliberating upon culture in the United Kingdom as represented in the literary works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Roald Dahl and JK Rowling. We posit that literature is an art form that invariably represents the zeitgeist, the beliefs and the biases of the society the author inhabited (either directly through social commentary or indirectly through allegory and subtext). This cultural paradigm changes over time as societies evolve. Building upon our prior work, this study looks at evaluating the culture of the UK, using Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions of Power Distance and Masculinity, and looking specifically at the characters in the works of these authors. Arguably, minor characters, that are generally used for world-building, are the ones that better represent the society contemporary to the author, bespoke for the audience. We conducted four online workshops with Indian participants well-versed with the chosen texts. Through these workshops we analyzed minor characters for the Power Distance and Masculinity they reflect. Furthermore, even more meta discussions about societies and characters unfolded, giving us a rich tapestry of the cultural evolution of the United Kingdom's society. We found that the sets of characters in the fictional universes of the stories had grown to become more diverse and the authors had grown more bold with their criticisms of society over time. This paper also lays the groundwork for future culture studies that look into literature of a society and builds a platform for a deeper and more insightful understanding of persona building and design fiction.

A knowledge of cultural values of users is implicit to developing personas for HCI research. Hofstede's dimensions have been a prominent model in tracing cross-cultural influences in HCI but there has been significant criticism for treating culture as monolithic and reducible to a few statistics. In this paper we investigate two of Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions, namely Power Distance and Masculinity. Is popular literature an accurate reflection of the cultural values of its intended audience? Through the viewpoint of the modern, English-educated Indian, we conducted a qualitative inquiry, with a focus on elements like characters, events and reflections that bring out the Power Distance and Masculinity in popular fiction from the UK, by authors Arthur Conan Doyle, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. We conducted workshops with expert readers familiar with the work of these authors and analyzed the data to formulate an evolution of power disparities and social predilections in the UK society over the past century. We gathered insights into the evolution of societal values and how authors contrast the mainstream with the exceptional to create a diegetic universe that is cogent with the life and times of the audience they are written for. As the first probe in a larger study, we reflect on the methodological learnings from this inquiry, reflecting on the mechanisms of conducting post factum inter-cultural studies and biases. Our conclusions discuss the feasibility of using popular literature as a barometer of cultural values of society, and its potential role in developing user personas.

The percentage of elderly population in India has been increasing in recent years and so have been lifestyle-related conditions such as cardiovascular diseases. In order to live an active and healthy life, it is important for elderly to manage their routine health and fitness activities such as exercising, following nutrition and diet etc. This need has become pressing after the COVID-19 lockdowns. Though there are many technology artefacts designed to motivate and help elderly people live a healthy lifestyle, adoption of such artefacts remains low for this population. In this paper, we present findings from interviews with 15 elderly people related to their needs and preferences about health and fitness, and their attitudes and knowledge about using technology to support these. Our main finding was that though there is an increase in technology usage by the elderly, much of it is restricted to communication and content consumption and not towards managing health and fitness. After the interview, we demonstrated selected applications and devices to the participants in order to understand their perceptions on existing technology in the market in managing their health and fitness. Based on participants’ perceptions towards technology and their needs related to routine health and fitness, we highlight some design opportunities including smart trackers, wearable bands, localized food and recipe app, language-based personalization and setting up “tech clinics” to help elderly to manage their health and fitness.

Recent advancements and economic feasibility have led to the widespread adoption of conversational digital assistants for everyday work. While research has focused on the use of these conversational assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant or Alexa, by young adults and families, very little work focuses on the acceptance and adaptability amongst the older adults. This SIG aims to discuss the use and benefits of these conversational digital assistants for the well being of older adults. The goals for this SIG are to: (i) explore the acceptance/adoption of voice-based conversational agents for older adults. (ii) explore anthropomorphism in the design of conversational digital assistants. (iii) understand triggers (scenarios of use) that can initiate the process of reminiscence thus leading to meaningful conversation. (iv) explore conversational User Experience. (v) explore the co-existence of non-conversational use cases.

This SIG proposes starting a discussion on the CHI platform about the issues pertinent to the design of digital payments and digitization of financial services. Although there has been a lot of discussion in HCI around domains such as health and education, the domain of financial HCI is still nascent. The purpose of this SIG is to engage researchers and the broader community at CHI in the discussion and debate around digital payments for the next billion users. We propose creating a live working document starting before the SIG which continues to develop during and after the SIG. This live document will enable to engage with a wider audience of researchers, and industry practitioners outlining processes, methods, and tools that HCI4D researchers have created to work with emergent users to develop ICT interventions.

Parents, along with teachers, play crucial roles in the academic development of children. Studies in the developed countries have found that parental engagement in the children's education is an important predictor for children's academic success. However, less is studied about how parents in a developing country context could engage in their children's education. The recent ASER report 2018 states that the quality of school education has gone down although there is a significant improvement in the enrollment in the last 5 years. In such a case, what supplementary support can the parents provide for better academic outcomes of the children? It is also interesting to investigate how much do the parent and the teacher know about the child's subject knowledge. Are they on the same tangent? Secondly, do the parents who are better engaged make a better academic assessment of the child? We did a baseline study with 6 teachers and 22 parents whose children study in 6th standard in a Odia medium school in Khordha, Odisha. We compared the self-reported assessments by the parents and the teachers about the child's understanding of a particular subject through Likert-scale questionnaires. We also compared them with the actual test scores of the children obtained from the school. We found that there is a medium correlation between the assessment by the parents and that by the teachers. The correlation between the parent's subjective assessment and the child's actual test score was found to be poor. Surprisingly, we also found the same for teacher's subjective assessment and the child's actual test score. We discuss several qualitative insights for these results. Also, we provide potential design implications for better parental engagement in the developing country context.

"Emergent users" in the developing regions can interact better with a visually augmented audio interface (AV, the audio-visual) than an audio interface (A) like IVRs and a graphic user interface (G) on two grounds. First, audio prompts users to meet goals and thereby brings directedness to the interface. Second, visuals bring persistence by presenting options on the screen in parallel. To illustrate, 36 users performed information and transaction tasks on prototyped AV, A and G banking applications. Results: With AV, users exhibited better task completion than G and A. Though they were not as fast as G but they took less time than A. They rated AV higher on SUS scale than A, G.

This project conducted an experiment to investigate into micro navigation for the visually impaired. To investigate this, we compared navigation assisted by a prototype created using instructions from a visually impaired volunteer and the same with Google maps. The study found that visually impaired participants navigated with fewer errors, recovered by themselves and reported less workload while using the prototype created with the instructions from the visually impaired person than Google maps.

Mathematics is a challenging subject for middle school students due to the introduction of concepts that are abstract and unrelatable in a real-world context. Emerging Augmented Reality (AR) technologies afford to visualize those abstract concepts integrated with the physical environment. Hence, we developed an AR app, MathReality, to teach the mathematics concept of exponents in more concrete ways and help them move from concrete to more abstract understanding of the concept. Preliminary results suggest the app was useful to the users and helped them learn the concept easily. The paper concludes with the next steps for the project, in terms of its design, implementation, and evaluation.

Stone column is a proved ground improvement technique used for the enhancement of bearing capacity of soft soil and to accelerate the consolidation effect. The design criteria and the construction technique of the stone column vary according to the type of soil, soil drainage conditions, and the type of project involved. In most of the ground improvement projects, due to lack of knowledge and poor practice in construction technique, the time and cost of an overall project gets adversely affected. The present study involves different methods of analyzing the effectiveness of stone column. The present work also includes a comparative study of the standard codes for the design and construction of stone column of different countries and organisations. The effects of the difference in calculation of basic parameters, design considerations, and installation techniques have been studied, and an attempt is made to provide the best possible procedure for the design and construction of stone column.

Swarachakra is an Abugida text input keyboard available in 12 Indian languages. We enhanced an accessible version of Swarachakra Marathi with speech input. However, speech input could be error-prone, and especially so for languages where speech recognition technologies are new. Such errors could either slow the user down due to the need for editing, or go unnoticed, leading to high uncorrected error rates. We therefore conducted a within-subject empirical study to compare the user performance of keyboard-only input method with keyboard+speech input method with 11 novice visually impaired users. We found that keyboard+speech input was almost 11 times faster, reaching 182 characters per minute, and had a lower uncorrected error rate than the keyboard-only input, and in spite of having higher corrected error rates. Though we used a wide variety of phrases in our study, we observed that all phrases were faster on average with the keyboard+speech input method. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first empirical study to evaluate the performance of speech enabled text input in Marathi for visually impaired people. This is the highest reported speed by visually impaired users in any Indian language.

This paper reports findings from a study aimed to understand how urban poor pre- and postnatal women in India use ICT tools like mobile phones for information seeking. The study was divided in 2 phases. In phase 1, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 66 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slums located in 4 cities in India. In phase 2, we conducted a survey with 102 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slum located in 9 cities in India. The aim was to understand care giving during and after pregnancy, nutrition, terminology used during pregnancy, and interpretation of visual material. This paper summarizes the findings, which include the importance of the use of appropriate terminology to design content in a multilingual country, identifying triggers for information seeking behaviour, and approaches to technology acceptance for information seeking. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for design of future ICT-based interventions in resource constraint settings.

The aim of this theoretical note is to highlight some open challenges in supporting the design for emergent users. This preliminary note first situates the emergent user at the nexus of three main recent HCI trends: cultural/cross-cultural computing; HCI4D/ICT4D and postcolonial computing. Further based on a literature survey, it then highlights five interrelated challenges ranging from the need for the supporting the mental models of the emergent users to the devising of intermediate conceptual structures that support the activity of design.

With rapid penetration of mobile devices in India, it has become important to understand how well can emergent users navigate menus. Literature shows somewhat inconsistent result in their performances with menu elements organized in a deep hierarchy, in a shallow hierarchy, and in a list. The current study investigates the performance of emergent users on a navigation task using two different menus (5-level deep hierarchy vs. 5-page list). Prototypes were made with 3 separate interfaces; namely graphical user interface (GUI), audio only interface (AOI) and audio-visual interface (AVI). A total of 24 emergent users carried out 6 test-tasks each (GUI-deep, GUI-list, AOI-deep, AOI-list, AVI-deep, AVI-list). Results show that participants navigate faster-using list menu on GUI and AVI, whereas they perform faster-using hierarchical navigation on AOI. Modalities with visual elements (GUI, AVI) performed faster than the audio (AOI). We discuss the implications of our findings for designing interactive devices for emergent users and possibilities for future research.

Can a reasonably robust speech recognition engine improve text entry speeds in Indian languages in spite of the time spent by users in correcting errors? We investigate this question in this paper. We conducted a within-subject longitudinal study to evaluate performance of keyboard-only input and keyboard+speech input for Hindi with 20 novice users. We found that keyboard+speech input is 2.5 times faster than keyboard input. Results also showed that the difference in performance was lower for phrases picked from poems, songs and phrases that used less frequently used words. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study that compares performance of these two input modalities in an Indian language.

Over several years, our team has been involved in participatory design of novel future technologies with people in resource-constrained contexts in India and Kenya. A key motivator is to include these groups, who often have lower literacy, infrequent access to data connections, low exposure to technology, and other constraints, in the process of shaping and appropriating devices and services. This is in contrast to what typically happens in such regions, where technologies from traditional markets (e.g., in USA and Europe) "trickle down" after several years. In this case study, we explore the potential and barriers of one such new platform - the Physical Web In resource-constrained contexts in Mumbai and Nairobi. The Physical Web is an open source Bluetooth-based beacon system, which aims to provide quick and seamless interaction with physical objects over a web platform. Our goal is to understand how this emerging technology might provide local small enterprise traders in these regions with the facility to quickly and easily create and distribute a simple online presence via a local broadcasting medium. In this case study we discuss the design rationale for the approach in terms of how it might address issues around users' resource constraints, and present initial findings from deployments in the two locations.

Many users value the ability to have quick and frequent sight of their mobiles when in public settings. However, in doing so, they expose themselves to potential risks, ranging from being targets of robbery to the more subtle social losses through being seen to be rude or inattentive to those around them. In nature, some animals can blend into their environments to avoid being eaten or to reduce their impact on the ecosystem around them. Taking inspiration from these evolved systems we investigate the notion of chameleon approaches for mobile interaction design. Our probes were motivated, inspired and refined through extended interactions with people drawn from contexts with differing ranges of security and privacy concerns. Through deployments on users' own devices, our prototypes show the value of the concept. The encouraging results motivate further research in materials and form factors that can provide more effective automatic plain-sight hiding.

This paper presents the results of a within-subject longitudinal evaluation on Inscript keyboard, which is the national standard layout for Indian scripts. We studied the practical upper bound speed and accuracy as well as the effect of practice. Through longitudinal transcription task of 400 repeated attempts, we observed typing speeds for highly experienced users consistently peak close to 120 cpm i.e. 2.5 times that of fastest speeds reported in literature. Our analysis compared the lower bound times for Tap, Tap+LongPress and Shift+Tap, the three text input mechanisms in this keyboard. Among the two alternative methods, our findings established Tap+LongPress method to be faster than Shift+Tap method and almost equally accurate. Also, we derived a model which explains the influence of corrected errors and number of practice attempts on the typing speed.

The SIGCHI EC has articulated the following 10 values. Specifically, these are instrumental values: They are our preferred methods of behavior. They are not an end goal, but they translate into a means by which an end goal is accomplished.

Though several keyboards for Indic languages are available on Android Play store, few are accessible by the visually impaired. Particularly, none of the gesture-based keyboards are accessible. We developed an accessible prototype of the popular gesture-based, logically organised Hindi keyboard Swarachakra. In this paper, we present findings from a two-part study. In the first part, we conducted a qualitative study with 12 visually impaired users on Swarachakra. In the second part, we conducted a longitudinal, within-subject evaluation comparing Swarachakra and Google Indic keyboard. At the end of the two-week long study, 10 participants had spent an average of 6.5 h typing, including training and text input tasks. Our study establishes benchmark for text input speeds for Indic languages on virtual keyboards by visually impaired users. The mean typing speed on Swarachakra was 14.53 cpm and that on Google Indic was 12.79 cpm. The mean speeds in last session were 21.72 cpm and 18.36 cpm respectively. Regression analysis indicates that the effect of keyboard was significant. In addition, we report the user preferences, the challenges faced and qualitative findings that are relevant to future research in Indic language text input by visually impaired users.

This paper describes the insights gained from user studies conducted with less-literate smartphone users in the context of Usable Smartphone Information Security. For the purpose of this study, we present the analysis and findings from 70 users. 37 users were selected using convenient sampling from a metropolitan city and 33 from a nearby town. We report findings on PINs and Pattern passwords, Phone as an Information Device and as a Commodity, Asset Valuation, Risk Identification, Risk Assessment, Risk Mitigation, Password Management, Privacy, amongst others.

With the objective of designing an accessible date picker, we heuristically evaluated features of 14 date-picking widgets / calendar for accessibility by visually impaired users. We found accessibility problems with most products. We did a comparative evaluation of various parts of products to understand the relative accessibility of the default views, the month selection interfaces and a far-away date selection interfaces with 12 blind users. We found that a brief introduction of about two minutes was enough for users to be able to successfully perform all tasks. With the exception of month selection interfaces, the differences in time taken and user rating was not significant. We also learnt about several design issues that were relevant to the design of date pickers. All these issues will help us to build an accessible date picker that can be used by many applications on smartphone.

In this paper, we aim to relate the design of WhatsApp with its adoption in developing countries and inform the design of future products. In the last two and a half years, a large number of 'emergent users' in India, have adopted WhatsApp. They have been able to do 'account holding' tasks with a greater ease, which means they establish social online identities, manage off-line communication, share and forward content, and create and join groups with less difficulty. WhatsApp has certain design based advantages over the conventional account holding applications whose adoption is not easy by the emergent users because ofcertain barriers. These barriers arise due to user characteristics like lack of technology exposure andlow levels of education and income. We used User-Usage model as a theoretical lens to understand how design features of WhatsApp may have helped the emergent users overcome the common barriers. This analysis was supported with the findings of contextual interviews done with 108 emergent users to understand their WhatsApp usage. We found that simplification of registration process and interaction mechanisms, reduction of choices, freeing users from cognitively intensive chores and sacrificing features that were less relevant in users' contexts were some of the ways through which the design of WhatsApp managed to remove barriers in adoption. This study helps us identify the design choices that could make other applications easier to adopt by the emergent users.

As part of an ongoing standardization effort, we were asked to evaluate Marathi text input mechanisms on smartphones. We undertook a between-subject longitudinal evaluation of four existing keyboards with 153 novice users who participated for 31 sessions each, spread over 3--4 weeks. In this paper, we present the empirical results of the performance of these keyboards and discuss them with respect to their designs. We found that keyboards with logical layouts performed marginally better than keyboards with partially frequency-based layouts. Results also showed that users performed poorly on keyboards that have word prediction features in comparison with keyboards that don't have prediction features while typing Marathi. We speculate that this difference in performance is related to a "cognitive toll" that the users pay to use word prediction. We identify several directions for future research.

This is the first progress report of the Arts Humanities Research Council research project 'Play to Grow: Augmenting Agriculture with Social Impact Games'. This project explored and tested the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India. The social impact game Bumper Crop was developed through the project in both digital and physical platforms based on the experiences and challenges of being a small holding farmer in India. This digital beta version is published and available for free download on Google Playstore and the physical version is available on the project website (playtogrow.org). The research team included UK/India academic researchers and practitioners led by Dr. Misha Myers of Falmouth University and the digital game prototype was developed with Dave Griffiths of FoAM Kernow. The team worked in partnership to develop the game with the New Delhi-based non-profit organisation Digital Green as part a participatory co-design methodology involving small-holding farmers and village mediators in Madhya Pradesh. The development of the game was undertaken through partnership between Falmouth University and Digital Green and according to each organisation's policies and procedures, which cover research ethics, confidentiality and public safety. Informed consent was secured from participants and their confidentiality/ anonymity has been protected.

This paper was presented at Storystorm Workshop at the ACM Design of Interaction Systems Conference 2014, Vancouver, 21-25 June. Storying in games can effectively promote pro-socialpurposes by bringing complex systems, social issues,cultural knowledge and practices to life. This paperconsiders a case study of the game ‘Bumper Crop’developed in a specific socio-cultural context with smallfarmers in India aimed at communicating the real lifeissues and challenges they face, along with those ofrural development and maintenance of sustainableagricultural practices. In particular, it discusses theway that stories operate within the game and in socialimpact games in general and how they are an effectivemediated environment for knowledge integration andidentification.

We were asked to evaluate input mechanisms for touch-screen devices with the objective of standardising one of them for each of 14 major languages of India. For this purpose, we propose a protocol that consists of a 45-minute long training session, a 20-word first-time usability test, and a longitudinal test consisting of about 30 sessions, each of which required the user to type about 10 phrases 4 to 6 words long (a total of 300 phrases). The evaluation should be done with school children from standards 4th to 7th. The course of the evaluation may last 2-4 weeks for each user. To help follow the protocol over this long period and to collate the data, we offer a tool. Currently, we provide test corpora for Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Odia, Tamil, Telugu, and Urdu. We have ensured that each corpus represents a mix of informal communication between people, popular phrases from films, songs, poetry and public discourse, and formal texts from school books and literature. We have tagged each phrase according to typing difficulty, phrase length, and memorability and age appropriateness. We evaluated the protocol through pilot tests with 206 users in Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali, Odia, Assamese and Tamil. In this paper, we present the original protocol, the detailed findings from the Marathi pilots, and the proposed modifications to the protocol.

Multigrade schools are schools where students of several grades study in a single class under a single teacher concurrently. This paper is a small attempt to find design opportunities to improve formal learning in such schools. User studies were conducted in five schools in rural Gujarat to identify challenges and opportunities in such schools. Analysis of such studies surfaced circumstances ranging from class combination and spatial movements of students, to unavailability of teachers, and less instruction time. These gave insights regarding students' behavior in groups, spatial arrangements, importance of tangible artifacts, and interaction among peers. The paper discusses design opportunities especially from the point of view of HCI community. It throws light upon insights, design implications, and in few cases design ideas.

'Jodo' is a language learning tool with a grammatical approach, which enables users to build and speak complete Hindi sentences, with the vocabulary that they have learned (Or might learn along the way). Jodo means 'join', in Hindi, and it reflects the core of the tool -- learning to join together grammatically accurate Hindi sentences. The focus of the tool is Hindi grammar, and the aim is to deliver it to the user by masking as much of the actual grammatical terms as possible. The Hindi skills in focus are: Listening (supplemented with reading transliterated text), and Speaking. The learning in Jodo is divided into 7 levels -- with an increasing level of grammatical complexity. Each level is divided into three stages:Learning: Where the user learns to internalize Grammar rules in sentence building through reading, listening, and exploration.Dialog: Where the user practices composing and speaking out simple sentences, and overcomes the speaking barrier.Test: Where the user plays a small game, which is like an exercise. The goal of the Test stage is to re-enforce the learning goal of the current level, revise the learning in the previous levels, and test the user's ability to build sentences or word phrases. Three levels of Jodo were evaluated with the users. It was found that the users learnt to build grammatically correct sentences within the limitation of the vocabulary known. They were also able to carry out a simple, impromptu conversation with a local.

We describe a qualitative study conducted using Contextual Inquiry of 60 low-literate users in India. For the purpose of this study, we define low-literate as those users whose education is equal or more than Standard Four and less than or equal to Standard Eight in the Indian State education system. Our users were recruited primarily from the contractual house-keeping staff of a very large Private Organization and an Educational Institute (42 Male, 3 Female), household help (3 Female), drivers (5 Male), guards (1 Male), shopkeepers (1 Male, 1 Female) and homemakers (4 Female). Our objective was to develop an understanding of information security issues in the context of the mobile phone, identification of problems and design ideas for design of interventions. Our methodology included Contextual Inquiry and Analysis with notes pertaining to User Statements, Task Breakdowns, Observations and Design Ideas. The notes across the study were consolidated using Affinity Diagrams.We found that users have an elementary understanding of asset valuation and response. Literacy impedes adoption of an appropriate response to the threats using the mechanisms provided by the mobile phone since conceptual models are not clearly comprehended. It is also impeded because the users are unable to articulate a structured response to the landscape of threats. Due to the cognitive load induced by the possible factors which may get involved in risk articulation, users tend to adopt mitigation techniques propagated by the micro-networks without complete comprehension of risks or due analysis. Belief systems are more likely to drive a response than a more reasoned, well-aware response. Information or awareness is propagated via social mechanisms -- however, these are not necessarily correct most of the times, primarily due to the inappropriate conceptual models formulated. The interface and conceptual model complexity of a modern touch screen smartphone compounds matters. Mobile Learning aids or Gamification of concepts can help users adopt more appropriate response mechanism to perceived threats to privacy and security issues. Interfaces built with single sign-on, local language display and text input would also help in building more safe environments for users to use the mobile phone. While more-literate users are likely to mimic a 'plan-do-check-act' model low-literate are more likely to have a 'do' or a 'do' or a 'do-act' cycle due to non-awareness or non-comprehension of 'plan-check' components.

In this presentation, I trace the evolution of the three phases of practice and research of HCI in India from 1990 to 2015. This presentation is extended from my previous article on the history of usability in India from year 2011 [1].

The Asia Pacific region is unique and diverse. Due to its characteristics, defining what will work in the Asia Pacific region might be the hardest challenge. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) can provide guidance on how technology should be designed and adopted. On the other hand, there is a big gap on the awareness and understanding on the importance of HCI to improve the design and development of technology for living. We welcome both academia and industry and provide an excellent opportunity to exchange ideas and information on HCI. Under the big conference theme "Crossings", this symposium aims to bring about cross exchange of information and transfer of knowledge in this multidisciplinary environment and multi-socio-economic aspects of research in HCI.

The Azim Premji Foundation has created a repository of educational CDs based on various state curricula for bringing technology-based learning to schools, specifically schools in rural areas. This initiative is expected to meet several objectives, primarily: (a) to attract children to schools; (b) once attracted to school, sustain their interest in attending school; and (c) ensure effective learning by providing relevant and compelling content. Evaluating the first two objectives is an ongoing process, made possible through direct measures— tracking enrolments and dropouts. However, to ascertain learning effectiveness of the CDs, an objective analysis and evaluation of the product was needed. In this article we share our experience of using the heuristic evaluation technique to evaluate the CDs and the extended Garrett's model of user experience for organizing the findings of each CD into clear action lists for redesigning existing CDs and designing others in the future.

This paper presents a method and results of an ethnographic study aimed at building an understanding of Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) adoption in Mumbai, India. The study combined field observations and semi-structured interviews (N=43) of early ATM adopters, bank customers who do not use ATMs, and people who used the ATM for the first time as part of our research. Data were analysed to identify specific cultural traits that may affect the adoption of ATMs in urban India. Results demonstrated the unique role of the cultural context in affecting users' expectations and behavioural possibilities, thus determining people's response to the machine. This led to the conclusion that an understanding of cultural biases and metaphors can facilitate technology diffusion and acceptance informing design localisation and supporting the development of strategies to motivate and train users., © Elsevier

Swarachakra is a text input method developed for Indic scripts on touch-screen devices. Swarachakra uses a logically ordered design based on the structure of Indic scripts. Swarachakra displays the consonants sequenced according to the logical structure of Indic scripts, phonetically grouped and arranged in a grid similar to those found in most school textbooks. Currently we have launched Swarachakra for Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, Odia and Punjabi (Gurmukhi) for Android devices.

We developed an interactive voice response (IVR) system called TAMA (Treatment Advice by Mobile Alerts) that provides treatment support to people living with HIV / AIDS (PLHA) in developing countries, who are on antiret-roviral therapy (ART). We deployed TAMA with 54 PLHA in 5 HIV clinics in India for a period of 12 weeks. During the study, we gathered feedback about TAMA's design and usage. Additionally, we conducted detailed qualitative interviews and analysed usage logs. We found that TAMA was usable and viable in the real life settings of PLHA and it had many desirable effects on their treatment adherence. We developed insights that inform the design of TAMA and some of these can be generalised to design of other long-term, frequent-use IVR applications for users in developing countries in the healthcare domain and beyond.

A fair amount of literature has been published concerning the gaps between HCI and software engineering. However, most of it tends to look at the effects of these gaps rather than their causes. We argue that the use of autoethnographic methods would help us in identifying the root causes of these gaps and can bring us closer to finding potential solutions. In this paper, we focus on issues associated with effort estimation for HCI activities in three projects in three typical engagement models for outsourced software development projects in a mainstream IT company in India, namely Fixed Price model, Mixed model, and Time & Material model. We found that the HCI practitioner needs to negotiate her position with several members of the team, both within the vendor and client organisations. At times, a foot-in-the-door project turns out to be a foot-in-the-mouth project. At other times, it leads to inefficiencies and imbalance of work load. The autoethnographic approach led to reflexive thinking by the HCI practitioner, helping her to develop a deeper understanding of all aspects of a problem, and bringing her closer to potential solutions in some cases. The paper also brings to light several aspects of autoethnography as a method, which can influence effort estimation of HCI activities for future projects.

We report findings of an experiment that investigates the effects of augmenting IVRs with visuals while varying menu depths and menu positions on the usage by non-tech savvy participants in rural India. For the experiment, we designed four different versions of IVRs capable of informing market rates of agricultural commodities to members of farming community, namely audio-visual-shallow, audio-visual-deep, audio-only-shallow and audio-only-deep. We asked each participant to find rates of four different commodities, out of which two commodities appeared "early" in the menu, while the other two appeared "late" in the menu. The results indicate that the use of visuals in IVRs significantly increases the likelihood of successful completion of the users' tasks even with variations in menu depth and menu position. The experiment contributes by illustrating the possibility of realizing deep menu depths in visually augmented IVRs. It is hoped that such integration would help realizing non-conventional applications of IVRs in developing regions.