Gesture Selection Study for a Maternal Healthcare Information System in Rural Assam, India

This paper presents a case study aimed at selecting suitable body gestures to represent actions that viewers of a televised maternal health information program will recognize and understand. This program is designed for pregnant women in rural Assam in India. We observed the gestures of 24 pregnant women to determine how to present the following seven computational functions that were used in the health information program: Select, Pause, Resume, Help, Activate Menu, Next, and Previous. The participants belonged to the low socio-economic strata in rural Assam, India and most had poor literacy levels. A participatory approach through a user-generated gesture collection method was used for this study. This study produced a total of 49 different gestures that participants performed to represent the seven computational functions. We selected seven body gestures based on the frequency of use, logical suitability to represent functions, the decreased possibility that the gestures would be accidently performed (false positives), and the ease of detection for the chosen technology (technical limitations).