Availability, accessibility, affordability, and appropriateness are among several factors that significantly affect the adoption and diffusion of medical devices in low- and middle-income countries. Design processes that promote early and frequent engagement with stakeholders may increase the...

Empirical social sciences rely heavily on surveys to measure human behavior. Previous studies show that such data are prone to random errors and systematic biases caused by social desirability, recall challenges, and the Hawthorne effect. Moreover, collecting high frequency survey data is often...

In 2009, fibre-optic cables landed on the East coast of Africa, the last major area of the world to be connected to the Internet triggering a decade of Internet development (Graham et al., 2015). During the same period, there has been a general transformation of the Internet from static content...

Smallholder farmers provide the foundation for food security in South Asia. However, increasing seasonal labor scarcity caused by rural out-migration has resulted in growing agricultural labor costs, presenting challenges to cash-constrained smallholder farmers that hire manual labor for land...

The article analyzes the role of appropriate technologies for mechanization and innovation in small-scale farming in the mountainous and hilly areas of Italy's Piedmont region. Our approach to appropriate technologies focuses on mountain farmers whose needs have not been met by advances in...

Billions of households worldwide cook using biomass fires and suffer from the toxic smoke emitted into their homes. Laboratory studies of wood-burning cookstoves demonstrate that secondary air injection can greatly reduce the emission of harmful air pollution, but these experimental advancements...

Quantifying the impact of improved stoves and fuels designed to combat the health and environmental burdens of traditional cooking is necessary to ensure sustainable outcomes but remains challenging for practitioners. The current standard method to determine household fuel consumption, the...

The cost-effectiveness and reliability of waste collection services in informal settlements can be difficult to optimize given the geospatial and temporal variability of latrine use. Daily servicing to avoid overflow events is inefficient, but dynamic scheduling of latrine servicing could reduce...

This paper proposes a methodology for "design for localisation" that addresses the challenge of designing a product for local manufacture and use, whilst considering the production process availability and the context of the local geographic area. The methodology is derived from a case study of...

Lighting of pedestrian paths fulfils crucial needs for informal settlement dwellers. A common technological approach in some countries to address these needs is to provide high-mast luminaires. In this paper it is shown by computer simulation that those luminaires are not able to create adequate...