DIAL: Design Inclusion and Access Lab
Research
Research in Collaboration
Google Research 2023
Updates are coming soon
The research project aims to understand the intersection of technology usage and financial inclusion through a deepened understanding of barriers and opportunities for advancing women's financial inclusion, including the experiences and perceptions of low-income women from across various regions and occupations.
Google Gender and Technology Research in Bangladesh 2017
South Asian women has less access in personal devices than women in other regions in the world. Culturally, they have to share mobile phones with family members and that their digital activities has to be monitored by family members. These practices reduce the privacy online for women. From this mindset, We studied 195 people all around India, Bangladesh (N=55) and Pakistan to understand the social norms and values in the South Asian countries women and trying to improve the privacy controls, by offering or providing algorithmic suggestions.
NSU-CTRG FUNDS (2020-2023)
Fund 1- Supporting Parent of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder during Covid-19
Fund 2- Remote Sensing and GIS based approach to Understand the Padma River Erosion: A Case Study of Naria erosion downstream of Padma bridge
Fund 3- Participatory Design-based Evaluation, Improvement & Deployment of Communication Application for Connecting Parents and Teachers of Children with Autism
Fund 4- Alternative Credit Scoring for the Credit Invisibles of Bangladesh
Digital RMG Mapping in Bangladesh 2020
In Bangladesh, around 4 million garment workers are working in more than five thousand garment factories all around the country. Most of the factories are situated in Dhaka and Chittagong divisions in Bangladesh along with the membership of BGMEA and BKMEA. This study explores to understand garments workers' lifestyles briefly, through conducting qualitative interviews with n= 55 garment workers (32 workers were female and 23 workers were male) from 40 different garments in 6 different groups. We uncover the several areas of workers' life, which represent the scenarios of all garment workers. We identified the challenges and qualities of workers' daily life, and come up with a possible tool that might make their life easy and better.
Research in NSUHCI-DIAL Group
Assessment of the Driving Behavior and Stress in Multi-modal Road Culture in Developing Countries
Driver’s level of stress can impact the driving performance which in turn impacts the overall traffic situation. This is important when the traffic scenario is challenging in terms of having traffic congestion, unruly drivers and lack of law enforcement as present in Bangladesh. Real time capability in system to provide support during discomfort can be useful in scenarios which are traditionally neglected. Absence of concern about wellbeing among commercial vehicle drivers during stressful driving situations may lead to accidents and poor lifestyle. The availability of low-cost components has opened up opportunities in areas where resources are constrained. We look at the self-reported stress of drivers along with their personality category using quantitative (n=88) and qualitative user (n=26) study approaches. Once the stress level is confirmed, we have designed a low cost real time stress measurement system using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and road conditions to support the drivers using low cost artifacts. The entire system is built up using a connectivity framework.
Development of Wearable Security for Women Against Sexual Harassment
We developed Jalli middleware to connect with a very low cost IoT device 'Protibaadi' where communication takes place using available network options within the scenario. It is able to use low range communication (e.g, Bluetooth), available cellular network based communication and if the internet is available, it takes advantage of connecting to the cloud to store IoT data for long term analytics. The strength of the system lies it its ability to act in real time. We hope that a system that is aware and sensitive about the resource limitations can bring out best possible system performance in the context of low resource regions.
Cyber Security Concerns and Data Breach
Third party applications are the source of enjoyment through various trivia, games and utilities. Users are often unaware of the access they give to their applications. A simple application can access user’s personal information, placing users in vulnerable position, and resulting in a lot of negative experiences as well as security incidents. Experiences change the decision-making approaches which varies from person to person, and also between genders. Through closed group qualitative studies we are working for better experience among the users.
Teen-Parent Relationship in the Context of Bangladesh
Negative implications in the teen-parent relationship is a concern which has a profound impact on the relationship between them. Parents want to control the technology usage of teens for cyber abuse-related concerns, whereas teens try to hide their online activities from their parents. Misperception and behavioral difficulties are initiated in such circumstances between them. We found that there are distant relationships between teens and parents, and very often parental mediation influences it either negatively or positively.
Learning system for Autistic Children in the context of Developing Nations
A learning application designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is discussed here. In developing world context, the design process considers culturally adopted items in a basic learning application. Once the basic application was developed, close work with users explored the requirement for flexibility where parents can add items and voices that have emotional impact on children along with ability to connect to share what the a child is currently learning, as an effort to reduce distance between caregivers and special school educators. The work, titled DurontoShishu has been conducted in Bangladesh over a span of 1.5 years of time.
Ride-sharing Experiences in Bangladesh
Motorbike ridesharing service based on application in Bangladesh is independently popular and unique concept in ridesharing service among all over the world. In Bangladesh, Uber, Pathao, Shohoz, OBHAI etc. ridesharing companies are providing such service. Bangladesh first brought this concept in 2016. This motorbike ridesharing is the way of daily income for any unemployed, uneducated and low income people. Sometimes people are doing it as secondary job for extra income. However, this service helps to empower anyone and provide support to change the financial states of the low income people of Bangladesh. We explored among the motorbike drivers to know their economic growth, experience and the way of their empowerment. On the other hand, their raise a concern regarding ridesharing health and data privacy of the users. So are also exploring in all such possible dimensions.
Refugee (Rohingya) Health Problems in Bangladesh
Rohingya refugee community have faced various problems during their transition from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Around 1.7 million Rohingya people have migrated from Myanmar to Bangladesh in recent decade. A close study with this community along with corresponding doctors opened up challenges impacting the community in their physical health. There are also wounds from their experiences relating to mental conditions. It is clear that there must be a way to support the community for physical and mental wellbeing. We are working for technology solution that can support limited number of health workers towards wellbeing of this community.
Mini Nurse Healthcare Bot for Old Home
Modern days are not so comfortable for the elderly people compare to young people, because naturally they are passing a lonely day for a longer period of time. Elderly and physically weak people would like to lead an independent and quality life in their everyday lonely period, and some physical or mental support may help to improve their lifestyle. Healthcare is considered as an important issue all over the world, and developed countries always try to ensure better healthcare support to the civilians in different ways, whereas South Asian developing countries do not pay much attention to this aspect. There exist some multi-purpose robots for elderly people, but developing countries cannot afford this. From this perspective, to support their healthcare, we are thinking of similar kind of low cost solution. The development of a mini healthcare bot is able to assist the elderly people to take medicines as per to their schedule. This bot was initially built only for research purpose and now we can consider it as full functioning robot.
Bengali Bornomala (Alphabet) in Augmented Reality for Children
Bornomala AR is an Augmented Reality Application for Android devices which provides a better and easy way to learn Bengali alphabets. The name of the app is Bornomala AR where in Bengali, “Bornomala” means “alphabet”. This application is developed targeting the children of age 3 to 5 of Bangladesh, to make them more familiar with their mother language. From a qualitative research, the learning efficiency was measured with this application in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been found that, without the application, the average learning efficiency is 41.67% per week whereas with this application the learning efficiency becomes 58.33% per week with 17% improvement.
Social Justice and Digital Silence in the Context of Bangladesh
In August 2018, a student protest initiated in Bangladesh sought justice when two school students were run over by public bus. Student protesters were demonstrating on the street for days until they were physically attacked. Concurrent with the physical attacks, the country experienced a disconnect. Internet, restrictions on social media usage, and several high-profile arrests of people speaking about the incidents. These suppressive encounters created what we call a "digital silence." In response, we collected stories from people, which depict their effort to seek out information about the events unfolding and share their perspective of what happened. Through these in-the-moment stories, we see a glimpse of how the information suppression impacted people with varying proximity to the events, including protesters, bystanders, and family members. We also reflect on the benefit of the subtle defiance of storytelling for storytellers in the midst of this social justice effort.