By Sheba George, Charles Drew University, FitBaby Medical Sociologist.
We are fortunate to have a lot of
diversity on our team for the FitBaby project – from our academic disciplines
to our cultural backgrounds, personal lives and responsibilities for children.
The parents on our team, including
me, try to bring not only our professional expertise but also our own life
experiences to bear on the problems we are tackling. For me, going home from
the hospital with a healthy baby was nerve racking and exhausting. It’s hard
for me to even imagine the added worry about your child’s health and whether
you are doing the right thing as the parents of high risk infants. Evidence
from the literature and from our work indicates that these challenges can be
even greater for parents from lower socioeconomic and educational backgrounds
who may have limited resources.
My instinct as a parent was that
parents/caregivers would appreciate features that give a) immediate feedback on
the health status of their babies based on input of current data; b) alerts to
indicate that immediate attention is needed for their child; and c) guidelines
on what they can do at home to address potential problems. Parents in our
studies have also wanted to know if their children are “okay” and be alerted if
they might not be. What surprised me though were the differences we saw between
my instincts and what the parents we interviewed have said. While I am not
alone in wanting instant feedback on my children, the participants
in our studies have been more focused on social support and sharing information
about their infants than on seeing the details of daily life. These kinds of
differences remind us how important it is to take in multiple perspectives and
remember we aren’t designing for ourselves.
We had not consciously chosen to
have parents on the team but for me, as a social scientist, my status as a
parent has become important in my own thinking about this project. My recent
memories of parental zombiehood kick in to remind me of the importance of
making sure that the functionalities we build into the system are going to meet
the needs and motivate use by the likely exhausted parents. We are learning, as
a team, that leveraging our diversity and being consciously reflexive about our
different perspectives helps us collect and interpret ODL data, as well as
build our system more effectively.
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