Alida Veldsman - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Alida Veldsman

Information Technology for Development, 2008

Information Technology for Development, Feb 1, 2008

It is easy to find in the research literature examples of ICT4Dev initiatives that have failed. R... more It is easy to find in the research literature examples of ICT4Dev initiatives that have failed. Rather than continue with a focus on technologies, our journey has led us towards the establishment of a network of community based, ICT-enabled, sustainable, micro service enterprises where 'development through enterprise' is the key. The writers argue that such success requires a more socially responsible approach to business development. We have found that when the service delivery channel is enhanced by a coordinated approach to ownership and channel support, community based businesses work well. On this journey, the challenge has been to deploy ICT in "production" mode, so that saleable products and services can be quickly delivered to the targeted community. On the basis of such learning, this paper sets out a new paradigm for practitioners in this field. Here the term Infopreneurs™ is used to describe a ICT mediated network of "social entrepreneurs" who deliver sustainable and community level e-Business in Southern Africa.

2017 6th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions) (ICRITO), 2017

Paradigm shift for the delivery of healthcare services to be patient-centric across the globe can... more Paradigm shift for the delivery of healthcare services to be patient-centric across the globe cannot be overemphasised. Most patients are willing to be active participants in sharing and managing their own health information. Information Communication and Technologies have facilitated the provision of information systems and mobile applications to enable the exchange of health information between health consumers and health providers. Unfortunately, the systems that have been deployed in an African setting have not benefited most of the users due to a number of reasons. One of the factors is that most systems are not usable in the African context as they emulate designs from developed countries and hence rendering them less useful. This paper therefore intends to fill such a gap in the quest for designing usable and useful patient-centric systems, especially in an Afro-centric setting.

2017 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), 2017

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020. ... more mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020. It is focused on supporting Sustainable Development Goal 3 and Horizon 2020 Societal challenges by developing, researching and evaluating the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual enabled mHealth platform to support quality community-based primary maternal healthcare delivery at semi-urban, rural and deep rural clinics, based on end-user requirements in Southern Africa (Malawi, South Africa), East Africa (Kenya) & Horn of Africa (Ethiopia). This paper aims to share the co-design process applied to develop and validate the alpha prototype, and the implications this had on the design of the beta platform. The validation of the alpha prototype was undertaken with 49 participants from 14 healthcare clinics across Northern Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November–December 2016, using a mix of observation and semi-structured interviews. These findings have informed the co-design of the mHealth4Afrika beta platform, which will be installed in participating clinics on a phased basis during Q3 2017. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa.

This paper is part of a series dealing with the "Expansion of European Network of Living Labs (EN... more This paper is part of a series dealing with the "Expansion of European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) to Africa-Opportunities, Synergies, Benefits and Limitations". It provides an overview of the Sekhukhune Rural Living Lab and explores specifically the collaborative business incubation aspects of this Living Lab. It highlights some of the business incubation challenges with regards to the "marriage" between 'Systems of Innovation' and the (SMME) inhabitants of "natural daily life /work environments". It is also an effort at raising the interest of other actors in this arena to collaborate in this endeavour and to collectively find ways of ensuring a more inclusive, real world (and real people) approach to rural development.

Technologies for Development, 2018

One of the major challenges facing most developing countries such as South Africa today is how to... more One of the major challenges facing most developing countries such as South Africa today is how to take full and smart advantage of quite spectacular and far-reaching advances in science and technology not only in promoting national economic development but particularly addressing the needs of poor and marginalised sections of society. Whilst technology access in the pre-digital era has always been a major barrier to economic and social development in developing countries, this is no longer an absolute barrier for at least three reasons: first, the proliferation of distributive and open technologies, and limits to the power of proprietary frameworks; second, the increasingly lower delivery cost of new technologies; and third, the emergence of multiple sources of technology innovation and development in civil society. Despite this, it is not altogether clear that South Africa is sufficiently exploiting the multiplier effects of new technology opportunities across the traditional rural and urban, and black and white social barriers, especially insofar as real empowerment of the poor and marginalised are concerned. There is still, in some respects a growing, technological divide in our country, and the dividends of our technological age are rarely passed on equally to different social classes, ethnic groups and geographic communities in South Africa. The problem of a continued technological gap may be partly to do with the economics of 'access' by poor communities. However, there also seems to be major problems with the absence or weakness of requisite conditions-social, institutional and political-necessary for its effective social appropriation.

2020 IST-Africa Conference (IST-Africa), 2020

Though Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) have become pervasive across various as... more Though Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) have become pervasive across various aspects of educational settings, their adoption and diffusion vary among developing and developed schools, often described as the Digital Divide. In this work, we conducted a baseline study in KwaZulu Natal, Mpumalanga as well as the North West and Eastern Cape in South Africa, to determine the status of the use of ICT resources in different schools across multiple provinces. The baseline study used a survey instrument based on an e-maturity framework and is part of a larger project. This paper presents the findings from the baseline study and outlines the elements of eReadiness. The paper concludes with the assessment results of the paper-based tool and presents the Beta version of the digitised tool.

Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare, 2017

Data quality (DQ) issues in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a noticeable trend to improve th... more Data quality (DQ) issues in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are a noticeable trend to improve the introduction of an adaptive framework for interoperability and standards to large-scale health Database Management Systems (DBMS). In addition, EHR technology provides portfolio management systems that allow Health Care Organisations (HCOs) to deliver higher quality of care to their patients than possible with paper-based records. The EHRs are in high demand for HCOs to run their daily services as increasing numbers of huge datasets occur every day. An efficient EHRs system reduces data redundancy as well as system application failures and increases the possibility to draw all necessary reports. Improving DQ to achieve benefits through EHRs is neither low-cost nor easy. However, different HCOs have several standards and different major systems, which have emerged as critical issues and practical challenges. One of the main challenges in EHRs is the inherent difficulty to coherently manage incompatible and sometimes inconsistent data structures from diverse heterogeneous sources. As a result, the interventions to overcome these barriers and challenges, including the provision of EHRs as it pertains to DQ will combine features to search, extract, filter, clean and integrate data to ensure that users can coherently create new consistent data sets.

2018 7th International Conference on Reliability, Infocom Technologies and Optimization (Trends and Future Directions) (ICRITO), 2018

People encounter diverse ICT products, from social environments to formal environments. However, ... more People encounter diverse ICT products, from social environments to formal environments. However, the engaging experience with each product differs from user to user. Many studies that have been done on the engagement of users with technology differ in what is considered as the user’s engagement. This paper proposes that the emotional, cognitive and behavioural engagement that occurs concurrently with a user’s encounter with technology, constitute the holistic User Experience (UX) Engagement and Interaction. Though conceptually separate, the dimensions for user engagement during the experiencing period are intertwined as such that the measurement approach for a dimension, extends to parts of another dimension. Such considerations could give a more holistic meaning to the measurement of the real engagement that the user has with the product in the experiencing period.

2017 IST-Africa Week Conference (IST-Africa), 2017

Ncediso™ is a mobile application currently under development by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan U... more Ncediso™ is a mobile application currently under development by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University. The purpose of the application is to provide information to community healthcare workers (CHWs) who are based in remote areas and who do not have the opportunity to attend regular refresher courses. The end user population has varying levels of digital literacy and therefore the user interface design and associated workflow is of great importance. To ensure that the final user interface not only meets the requirements but is also user friendly, two sets of user interfaces were developed. The purpose of this paper is to report on the requirements for a positive user experience that supports the workflow and leaves the end user with a feeling of satisfaction. To this end, the project set out to evaluate two user interfaces and make recommendations as to which is the preferred design. The paper reports on the findings of a comparative usability evaluation and makes as to the preferred user interface.

2016 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), 2016

mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020, ... more mHealth4Afrika is a collaborative research and innovation project, co-funded under Horizon 2020, that is evaluating the potential impact of co-designing an open source, multilingual mHealth platform on the quality of maternal and newborn healthcare delivery in rural and deep rural clinics. This paper presents results from a comprehensive baseline study carried out with 40 informants from the leadership of 19 healthcare clinics in Northern Ethiopia, Western Kenya, Southern Malawi and Eastern Cape, South Africa during November-December 2015, using focus groups and semistructured interviews. These findings identified human resource capacity, environmental, practical and technical challenges, and equipment and infrastructure deficits. Training requirements of healthcare workers were also identified. Constraints identified include the need for: intuitive, easy-to-use user interfaces to reduce the need for extensive training; use of flexible data protocols to facilitate cost effective bandwidth and effective data exchange; cost effective; low power consumption technologies to reduce cost of replication and scaling; solar charging units to increase availability; support for sensors and telemedicine due to a deficit of healthcare professionals in rural and deep rural clinics; and the need for easy configuration and adaptation to facilitate wider adoption. This insight will be used to inform codesign of the mHealth4Afrika platform during 2016-2018, based on user-centered design principles, leveraging current state-ofthe-art in terms of electronic patient record systems and medical sensors. It will also inform the minimum ICT infrastructure required in each clinic. The expected outcome is a multi-region proof of concept that can make a significant contribution in accelerating exploitation of mHealth across Africa.

2015 IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS), 2015

Interventions that focus on the socio-economic development of communities and the research associ... more Interventions that focus on the socio-economic development of communities and the research associated with it, are costing governments, research initiatives, donor communities to name but a few, billions in terms of time, effort and money. It is easy to find research literature and practical examples of the countless initiatives that have failed and less that have succeeded. Different approaches have been followed and different roads have been taken, with little success. The question remains why so many initiatives fail and so little succeed? What has been done differently? What indicates `failure' and what indicates `success'... and for whom? This paper focuses on the human side of technology interventions and how these are to be approached in low-income communities.

South African Computer Journal, 2015

The youth, especially school going children, are the future of any society. It is therefore impor... more The youth, especially school going children, are the future of any society. It is therefore important that children should receive adequate healthcare support at an early age in order to strive to preserve and ensure better education and welfare of the children and continuity in societal success. Despite the strategic initiatives that aim at improving the general health of school going children, such as South Africa’s Integrated School Health Policy, there still exist challenges in support programmes meant to alleviate the barriers to effective healthcare towards improved education for the school children. Advances in ICT enable a fundamental redesign of healthcare processes based on the use and integration of electronic communication at all levels. New communication technologies can support a transition from institution centric to user-centric applications. This paper defines key principles and challenges for designers, policy makers, and evaluators of user-centred technologies for...

In the light of multiple (documented) failures of ICT4Dev implementations in the developing world... more In the light of multiple (documented) failures of ICT4Dev implementations in the developing world and especially in the light of the failure of ICT adoption, ownership and application in the South Africa MPCC initiative, the writers argue for a “commercial /business development” approach to ICT4Dev initiatives. Finding the (service delivery) channel; ensuring ownership and support in the channel; deploying ICT in “production” mode to render saleable products and services into the channel and establishing new ICT intensive service enterprises within this channel becomes the suggested paradigm for future ICT4Dev practitioners. The paper therefore endeavours to provide a framework for sustainable community level eBusiness incarnations of ICT4Dev endeavours: Infopreneurs™ as “social entrepreneurs” in developing communities.

This paper is part of a series dealing with the “Expansion of European Network of Living Labs (EN... more This paper is part of a series dealing with the “Expansion of European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL) to Africa - Opportunities, Synergies, Benefits and Limitations”. It provides an overview of the Sekhukhune Rural Living Lab and explores specifically the collaborative business incubation aspects of this Living Lab. It highlights some of the business incubation challenges with regards to the “marriage” between ‘Systems of Innovation’ and the (SMME) inhabitants of “natural daily life /work environments”. It is also an effort at raising the interest of other actors in this arena to collaborate in this endeavour and to collectively find ways of ensuring a more inclusive, real world (and real people) approach to rural development.

2015 IST-Africa Conference, 2015

For children to benefit from education programmes, they need to be healthy. The provision of heal... more For children to benefit from education programmes, they need to be healthy. The provision of healthcare services in schools thus responds to the need of children but also increases the efficacy of other investments in child development, ensures better educational outcomes, achieves greater social equity and is a highly cost effective strategy. One such a strategy is South Africa's Integrated School Health Policy, which is a mechanism to improve the general health of school-going children as well as removing health barriers to learning, in order to improve education outcomes. The context in which the policy is implemented, however poses many challenges resulting in school health services not functioning in far-off schools in rural parts of the country of which the shortage of qualified nursing staff, lack of appropriate equipment and the remoteness of schools are contributing factors. In an attempt to find a solution to this problem, research into the use of technology as an alternative way to provide access to school healthcare services, are currently investigated. This paper shares how school nurses in rural Eastern Cape, use mobile devices with specific mobile applications, to improve access to healthcare and health education in schools.