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Designing an architecture for delivering mobile information services to the rural developing world

Published: 23 May 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Implementing successful rural computing applications requires addressing a number of significant challenges. Recent advances in mobile phone computing capabilities make this device a likely candidate to address the client hardware constraints. Long battery life, wireless connectivity, solid-state memory, low price and immediate utility all make it better suited to rural conditions than a PC. However, current mobile software platforms are not as appropriate. Web-based mobile applications are hard to use, do not take advantage of the mobile phone's media capabilities and require an online connection. Custom mobile applications are difficult to develop and distribute. To address these limitations we present CAM - a new framework for developing and deploying mobile computing applications in the rural developing world. CAM applications are accessed by capturing barcodes using the mobile phone camera, or entering numeric strings with the keypad. Supporting minimal navigation, direct linkage to paper practices and offline multi-media interaction, CAM is uniquely adapted to rural device, user and infrastructure constraints. To illustrate the breadth of the framework, we list a number of CAM-based applications that we have implemented or are planning. These include processing microfinance loans, facilitating rural supply chains, documenting grassroots innovation and accessing electronic medical histories.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '06: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web
May 2006
1102 pages
ISBN:1595933239
DOI:10.1145/1135777
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 23 May 2006

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Author Tags

  1. ICT
  2. client-server distributed systems
  3. mobile computing
  4. mobile phones
  5. paper user interface
  6. rural development

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  • (2023)Community Voice as Data: Affordances of Participatory Videos for International Program DevelopmentProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3581458(1-16)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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