Centering Culture in Health: Developing Culturally Safe Technology for Early Childhood Health Promotion, A community-based approach to technology design for child development support

Abstract

My dissertation investigates the potential of health technologies to improve child health outcomes while emphasizing diversity and equity. I explore both how mobile health interventions can be beneficial for parents and caregivers, and the potential risks if these technologies are not designed to be equitable and inclusive, drawing on prior work across the design of technologies created for parenting, child development, and early childhood health promotion. I explore the application of cultural safety, an approach to health services delivery, to sensitize technologies to the experiential differences between diverse children and families. My research highlights how current design and research practices often overlook the diverse experiences and contexts of families from diverse cultural backgrounds by surveying existing technologies and connecting with parents. I then demonstrate how we can integrate cultural safety into our practices by developing a heuristic evaluation method and collaborating with local parent communities to create a technology prototype that integrates the cultural safety approach. Overall, my dissertation offers a new lens for improving early childhood health technologies. By practicing cultural safety, we can ensure more equitable health outcomes for marginalized children and families by respecting the diversity of human experiences.