Shahidi

In late 2012 I was awarded an IU grant to travel to Kenya to shoot a series of videos for AMPATH (Academic Model for Providing Access to Healthcare). AMPATH is a consortium of U.S. Universities that provide clinical care in western Kenya. It is run by Indiana University. My grant was for producing a series of videos for a NIH study called HADITHI, run by Dr Rachel Vreeman (http://doctorvoversea.com). The aim of HADITHI is to increase the rate of HIV disclosure to adolescents. Many children in Kenya aren’t aware they have had HIV all their lives because for various reasons (stigma, fear of the trauma of knowing, etc.) their caregivers haven’t told them. But when kids reach a certain age they want to know why they are taking drugs and they start to ask questions. AMPATH feels that at this time it benefits a child to know their HIV status because they will take more responsibility concerning their medication. The videos I made were designed to aid in this process of HIV disclosure. We used actors to portray caregivers like a mother or father or grandmother and we used a couple of younger kids to play the parts of someone who knows their status and someone who doesn’t know yet. The actors addressed the camera in a two-camera shoot situation as they read their monologues from a teleprompter. The videos were supplemented with b-roll from the environment.

Back in the summer of 2103 as I was delivering these videos on DVD to AMPATH, Google donated 1200 Nexus tablets to AMPATH. I decided then to take the remaining money from my grant and develop an application the would present the videos in an organized way along with other helpful contextual information such as themes and credits. I worked closely with Mike Lulgjuraj, a staff member here in the School of Informatics and Computing, to create the app. The head of AMPATH’s IT department Dr Martin Were, subsequently saw they application (the first anyone had developed for the new tablets,) and contacted me about developing a mobile medical media app that would handle all of AMPATH’s media across their tablets and mobile phones. I brought together Mike and Todd Shelton (a colleague in Media Arts and Science) and we became NIH subcontractors to develop this application. Shahidi, Swahili for witness, is the name of the application. It is designed to see what media is available on the AMPATH server; download it to a mobile device; allow a Dr. to decide what to show a patient; and screen a playlist of various types of media to a patient. Today we did a demo of the application to get feedback before or first full version submission on Monday. It went well. Tweaks will happen over the weekend and we will submit our first complete version of the application on Monday. I expect a few weeks to follow of fixes and revisions and then it will be implemented into their mobile medical form application called mUzima.