Final seminar of the quarter tomorrow, hope to see you all there. Abstract: Popular chat apps are increasingly being leveraged to make a combination of patient-provider communication and peer support more accessible beyond formal healthcare settings. However, how these interventions are experienced in Global South contexts with phone sharing and intermittent data access is understudied. The context of stigmatized illnesses like HIV further complicates privacy concerns. We explore these concerns through a qualitative study of a six-month pilot of WhatsApp-based facilitated peer support groups, serving youth living with HIV in an informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. We draw on chat records and interviews with youth and the facilitator to describe their experience of the intervention. We find that despite tensions in group dynamics, intermittent participation, and contingencies around privacy, youth were motivated by newfound aspirations and community to manage their health. We use our findings to discuss implications for the design of chat-based peer interventions, negotiation of privacy in mobile health applications, and the role of aspirations in health interventions.
Bio: Naveena is a PhD candidate at University of Washington in the School of Computer Science and Engineering. She studies how emerging technologies have shaped care work in parts of the Global South, including in community health, nursing, and forms of telehealth. Her work uncovers the relationships between the design of sociotechnical systems and the valuation of care work, and what power relations they reproduce or resist in health and global development. -- Website: https://kurti.sh/ Public Key: https://flowcrypt.com/pub/kheim...@cs.washington.edu
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