Browsing by Author "Chininthorn, Prangnat"

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    Exploration of Deaf people’s health information sources and techniques for information delivery in Cape Town: A qualitative study for the design and development of a mobile health application
    (JMIR Publications, 2016) Chininthorn, Prangnat; Glaser, Meryl; Tucker, William David; Diehl, Jan Carel
    BACKGROUND: Many cultural and linguistic Deaf people in South Africa face disparity when accessing health information because of social and language barriers. The number of certified South African Sign Language interpreters (SASLIs) is also insufficient to meet the demand of the Deaf population in the country. Our research team, in collaboration with the Deaf communities in Cape Town, devised a mobile health app called SignSupport to bridge the communication gaps in health care contexts. We consequently plan to extend our work with a Health Knowledge Transfer System (HKTS) to provide Deaf people with accessible, understandable, and accurate health information. We conducted an explorative study to prepare the groundwork for the design and development of the system. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the current modes of health information distributed to Deaf people in Cape Town, identify the health information sources Deaf people prefer and their reasons, and define effective techniques for delivering understandable information to generate the groundwork for the mobile health app development with and for Deaf people. METHODS: A qualitative methodology using semistructured interviews with sensitizing tools was used in a community-based codesign setting. Twenty-three Deaf people and 10 health professionals participated in this study. Inductive and deductive coding was used for the analysis. RESULTS: Deaf people currently have access to 4 modes of health information distribution through: Deaf and other relevant organizations, hearing health professionals, personal interactions, and the mass media. Their preferred and accessible sources are those delivering information in signed language and with communication techniques that match Deaf people’s communication needs. Accessible and accurate health information can be delivered to Deaf people by 3 effective techniques: using signed language including its dialects, through health drama with its combined techniques, and accompanying the information with pictures in combination with simple text descriptions. CONCLUSIONS: We can apply the knowledge gained from this exploration to build the groundwork of the mobile health information system. We see an opportunity to design an HKTS to assist the information delivery during the patient-health professional interactions in primary health care settings. Deaf people want to understand the information relevant to their diagnosed disease and its self-management. The 3 identified effective techniques will be applied to deliver health information through the mobile health app.
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    Mobile Communication Tools for a South African Deaf patient in a pharmacy context
    (IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2012) Chininthorn, Prangnat; Glaser, Meryl; Freudenthal, Adinda; Tucker, William David
    This paper presents a case for 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 that communicate in South African Sign Language, miscommunication due to language barriers, under-education, under-employment and physiological deafness can lead to a potentially dangerous therapeutic outcome when Deaf people potentially 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.
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    Usability of an authoring tool for generalised scenario creation for signsupport
    (Telkom, 2015) Duma, Lindokuhle; Chininthorn, Prangnat; Glaser, Meryl; Tucker, William David
    This paper presents the usability testing results for an authoring tool that generalises scenario creation for a tool called SignSupport. SignSupport is a mobile communication tool for Deaf people that currently runs on an Android smartphone. The authoring tool is computer-based software that helps a domain expert, with little or no programming skills, design and populate a limited domain conversation scenario between a Deaf person and a hearing person, e.g., when a Deaf patient collects medication at a hospital pharmacy or when a Deaf learner is taking a computer literacy course. SignSupport provides instructions to the Deaf person in signed language videos on a mobile device. The authoring tool enables the creation and population of such scenarios on a computer for subsequent 'playback' on a mobile device. The output of this authoring tool is an XML script, alongside a repository of media files that can be used to render the SignSupport mobile app on any platform. Our concern now is to iteratively develop the user interface for the authoring tool, focusing on the domain experts who create the overall flow and content for a given scenario. The current authoring tool was evaluated for usability; for both pharmacy and ICDL course scenarios with purposive sampling. The findings suggest that the authoring tool can generalise SignSupport for multiple limited domain scenarios, mobile platforms and signed languages.