Brian DeRenzi will present the Department of Computer Science seminar with a talk entitled, "A 12-month Evaluation of ASTA, a Self-Tracking Application for ASHAs". 

His research aims to support community health workers (CHWs) in low-resource settings by providing them with personalized information regarding their work. This information is delivered through a combination of voice- and webbased feedback that is derived from data already collected by CHWs. In this talk, Brian will describe the in situ participatory design approach used to create usable and appropriate visual and verbal feedback for low-literate CHWs and present results and usage data from a 12-month randomized controlled study with 71 CHWs in India. 

Brian DeRenzi is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Cape Town. He has practical experience building tools to support and empower mobile workers at the intersection between governments and communities. For the last ten years, he has worked with end users to co-design, develop, deploy, and rigorously evaluate tools to support data collection, enhance communication, and strengthen the feedback loop between community-based workers and governmental systems. Brian is a Fullbright Fellow and, prior to joining UCT in 2015, worked as Research Scientist at IBM Research--Africa, helping to start the health research program when the Nairobi lab opened.