Exploring mobile technology as a medium to facilitate access to care giver experiences

Abstract

Care givers are providing an important health care service under difficult conditions in South Africa. They are extremely dedicated but often not well informed about the conditions of the persons in their care. The aim of this research is to explore how care givers provide the care service to establish their information needs. A case study was used to explore how care givers provide the care service in practice. Mobile technology using GSM (including EDGE and 3G) is used as a mechanism to provide access to information. Information was presented to them using edutainment material in the form of a comic strip. The care givers‘ responses to this mechanism are observed. The data collected from these observations, questionnaires and open ended interviews was analyzed using hermeneutics as the analytical lens. The findings indicate that mobile technology could be used to enable care givers to access information in the form of edutainment, but more research is required to establish the appropriateness of mobile technology as a means to access information required by care givers.