The HADITHI Videos
In late 2012 I was awarded an IU grant to travel to Kenya to shoot a series of videos for AMPATH (Academic Model Providing Access to Healthcare), a consortium of U.S. universities led by Indiana University that provides clinical care in western Kenya.
My grant was for producing videos for a NIH study called HADITHI, run by Dr. Rachel Vreeman. The aim of HADITHI is to increase the rate of HIV disclosure to adolescents. Many children in Kenya aren’t aware they’ve had HIV all their lives—for various reasons like stigma and fear of trauma, their caregivers haven’t told them. But when kids reach a certain age, they want to know why they’re taking drugs and they start asking questions. AMPATH believes that at this point it benefits a child to know their HIV status because they’ll take more responsibility with their medication.
The videos I made were designed to aid in this disclosure process. We used actors to portray caregivers—a mother, father, grandmother—and a couple of younger kids to play someone who knows their status and someone who doesn’t know yet. The actors addressed the camera in a two-camera setup, reading their monologues from a teleprompter. We supplemented the footage with b-roll from the local environment.
From DVDs to an App
In the summer of 2013, as I was delivering these videos on DVD to AMPATH, Google donated 1,200 Nexus tablets to the organization. I decided to take the remaining money from my grant and develop an application that would present the videos in an organized way, along with helpful contextual information like themes and credits. I worked closely with Mike Lulgjuraj, a staff member in the School of Informatics and Computing, to create the app.
Expanding to Shahidi
Dr. Martin Were, head of AMPATH’s IT department, saw our application—the first anyone had developed for the new tablets—and contacted me about building a mobile medical media app that could handle all of AMPATH’s media across their tablets and phones.
I brought together Mike and Todd Shelton, a colleague in Media Arts and Science, and we became NIH subcontractors to develop this expanded application. We named it Shahidi, Swahili for “witness.”
Shahidi is designed to browse what media is available on the AMPATH server, download it to a mobile device, let a doctor select what to show a patient, and screen a playlist of various media types. Today we did a demo to get feedback before our first full version submission on Monday. It went well. Tweaks will happen over the weekend, and then we submit. I expect a few weeks of fixes and revisions before it gets implemented into mUzima, AMPATH’s mobile medical forms application.