Fahad Idrees
ABSTRACT
Pakistan's agricultural sector has been making gigantic contributions towards the nation's economy, with agriculture accounting for 22% of the gross domestic product (GDP) while engaging approximately half of the country's labor force. A significant developmental challenge in this sector is inadequacy and inaccessibility of information regarding weather forecast. In this paper, we propose an Android-based solution for farmers that can facilitate the timely, localized, and customized dissemination of granular weather forecast that shields the whole agricultural ecosystem and supply chain from weather variability by appropriate decision-making. We describe our Android mobile application that sends a customized weather forecast that is configured according to the user preferences. Information is disseminated by the cloud server through encrypted SMS to the subscribing farmers containing weather information. This information is encoded through visuals and icons in a simple to understand user-interface that is accompanied by Urdu language text in a design tailored for low-literate farmers of Pakistan. The testing, feedback, and evaluation include design understanding, the effectiveness of icons and images, usability, adaptation to touch screen is in progress which will help us to reiterate the mobile app user interface (UI) to improve the preliminary design.
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Index Terms
- Weather Forecast Information Dissemination Design For Low-Literate Farmers: An Exploratory Study
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