CAREER: Enabling Healthier Futures: Understanding and Strengthening Sociotechnical Ecologies of Frontline Health Work

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The COVID-19 pandemic emphasizes how sociotechnical ecologies of frontline health work are vital to the wellbeing of society at large. This project will work to develop new knowledge about how to make frontline health infrastructures that deliver critical last-mile care in resource-constrained, underserved communities more robust, by leveraging data-driven and technologically mediated approaches to global health. Prior research has found that the data that such approaches rely on is frequently biased, incomplete, or missing. As a result, data infrastructures--individual health records, frontline health surveys, activity on social media and online health fora—often fail to capture local, sociocultural specificities. This project will work to actively engage the underrepresented voices of predominantly women frontline health workers (FHWs)—also among the most vulnerable and impacted—toward designing technology-mediated frontline health workflows. It will investigate supporting these technology workflows by making frontline health work more visible, distributing the burden of care work through selective automation, and providing avenues workers can use to transition toward improved economic livelihoods. It will work toward improved health outcomes for care-seekers from underserved communities, improved futures for the workers, and robust overall healthcare ecologies.The project will research how data-driven and technologically mediated healthcare can be directed toward the design of stronger frontline health ecologies, using community-centric, participatory approaches. Advancing scholarship at the intersection of human-centered computing and frontline health, the project will investigate three research questions. First, how can data practices and tools be designed and augmented to capture the work of FHWs that is currently not adequately visible, to enable better recognition of this work across state and healthcare authorities? Second, how can routine, everyday workflows be automated or supported to make work more manageable and the burden effectively distributed? Third, how can mobile health technologies support digital and data literacies among FHWs, to enable professional growth and employment opportunities in increasingly sociotechnical ecologies of frontline health? These research questions will be addressed through a combination of data collection methods, in conjunction with designing and developing systems, with local partners. The project will synthesize elements to contribute a design framework that grapples with interlocking power structures and oppressions, in order to impact future research undertakings with communities that have been historically marginalized.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.