One week down, two to go! We spent our morning at the World Hope Office putting finishing touches on our sparring presentation, Improving the AISHA Answers code (more on this later), reviewing our database, and planning for the next week! Last night after dinner, with some discussion on the changes being made to the current version of AISHA Answers, Vrushti insisted on running to get her computer and making the changes right then and there; it worked! Instead of having to tell AISHA that you want to ask a question after already opening the program, you’d simply say: “AISHA” before you ask the question!

Late night AISHA coding saved Vrushti’s sanity yet again.

But it gets even better…

At the World Hope office, Vrushti and Simone locked in and found a way to eliminate the “AISHA” trigger word, so the user can simply ask their question immediately after opening the program! This is something that the team has been talking about fixing since we joined the project nearly eight months ago! This will make our devices significantly more user friendly, especially in this setting: where technical literacy is not as advanced.

Later in the day was time for sparring, where we spent an hour answering questions from Khanjan and Michael about the future of AISHA and our fieldwork activities for the coming weeks. This meeting was extremely beneficial and provided us with new contacts and potential new use cases that we are talking about exploring in the near future. We are already working on scheduling interviews with two urban PHUs, EBK, and midwifery schools for next week, as well as a demo with nurses at Makeni Regional Hospital on Tuesday.

HIGHLIGHTS!!
Simone: getting the code to work!!!
Vrushti: getting alexa to cooperate
Natalie: bussing breakfast
Juliana: Planning demos for next weeks
Maaz: Sleeping in an extra hour
Gaby: Leaving the first sparring session behind us.

Rating: 3.5/5