Striking a Balance

In recent years there has been an increased interest in investigating how technology can be used to aid the millions of people living in low-income countries [2]. Mobile phones are emerging as powerful, affordable and pervasive computing devices that can serve the needs of widely deployed applications in resource-constrained environments. Previous work has emphasized the importance of working closely with local partners and maintaining fidelity with existing paperbased processes [3, 4]. While we agree with these principles, computing technologies can provide fundamentally new capabilities that argue for changing processes to benefit from these advantages. We base this reasoning on experience in designing, developing and evaluating a mobile system to aid health workers in Tanzania in classifying and treating child illnesses. The question we face is how to introduce these new processes and improve outcomes while taking into account the effects they may have on the workforce.