Adapting Ethnography for Design Research: Lessons Learnt form Design of Mobile Systems for Rural Health Care in Ethiopia

This paper presents a research targeting the design of context sensitive IT-enabled health information service for maternal and child health care in rural Ethiopia. The IT-based service platform designed and developed is anchored to the use of mobile phones and tablets so as to enable women living in remote rural areas receive basic public health related information without the need to travel long distances and help health extension workers make follow-ups on pregnant women. The underlying research questions relate to determining the extent of improvement in maternal and child healthcare situation in rural areas resulting from the application of ICT. The research approach employed is ethnographic based participatory action research with direct and active collaboration of the user community. Preliminary results of the research work indicate the potentials of ethnographic based participatory action research and contextualized IT-enabled tools as appropriate system development methods for community-centered IT-enabled application systems.