Digital Health Seminar Series: Nervo Verdezoto Dias

Nervo Verdezoto Dias (Cardiff University)

Co-designing Digital Maternal and Child Health: Socio-technical Challenges and Experiences from the Global South

Maternal and child health (MCH) is a global health concern, especially impacting countries in the Global South. Digital health technologies have shown potential to address MCH challenges by facilitating access to information and providing other forms of support throughout the maternity journey. However, many of these technologies often overlook caregivers (parents and families) and children’s lived experiences, do not involve all stakeholders (e.g., caregivers and healthcare staff) early and inclusively enough in the design process, and are disconnected from the complexities of everyday life and healthcare settings in the Global South. 

To design digital maternal and child health, we need to: 

• Understand different stakeholders’ lived experiences looking at how these are shaped by the broader sociocultural context and the situated infrastructures of care (e.g., arrangement of multiple people, daily practices, spaces, cultural norms, different technologies, and the invisible efforts different stakeholders make to care for themselves and others) beyond looking at individual behaviours
• Involve different community stakeholders in a meaningful way but without having assumptions nor expectations, and explicitly developing mechanisms to foster co-design readiness (emotional, cultural, confidence), mitigating power imbalances, and supporting participation when engaging with low-resource communities from the Global South

In this talk, Nervo will present a number of socio-technical challenges and experiences using several examples from different interdisciplinary co-design projects in the context of maternal and child health in the Global South (South Africa, Peru, India, etc.).

Speaker bio:

Nervo Verdezoto is the Lead of the Human-Centred Computer Research Unit and Senior Lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Health at the School of Computer Science and Informatics at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Previously, he was a Lecturer at the University of Leicester and a postdoctoral researcher at the Ubiquitous Computing and Interaction Group, and a research assistant at the Centre for Pervasive Healthcare at the Department of Computer Science, Aarhus University in Denmark. 

He has expertise in ethnographically informed design, user-centred and participatory design, and design and evaluation of sociotechnical systems with particular interest in the healthcare and sustainability domains. His previous research has investigated how older adults and pregnant women use self-care technologies in their everyday life and how these shape their everyday practices, clinical encounters and decision making. His recent work has investigated care infrastructures in the Global South (e.g., India, Ecuador, Peru, South Africa, Ghana, etc.) and how socio-technical and cultural practices influence people’s experiences of care, as well as the use of community-based co-design in low-resource settings for digital maternal and child health.

Research funded by GCRF, MRC, AHRC, EPSRC, Newton Fund, etc. He is a member of the recently funded Women’s Health Research Wales centre, a Health and Care Research Wales infrastructure providing research, innovation, co-production and leadership development support in women’s health. He is also part of The Centre for Social Care and Artificial intelligence LEarning (SCALE), also funded by Health and Care Research Wales.

Please note: this seminar will not be recorded