DECENT: A sociotechnical approach for developing mobile health apps in underserved settings.

Objective: Despite the fact that user engagement is critical to the efficacy of mobile health (mHealth) interventions in the Global South, many of these interventions lack user engagement features. This is because sociotechnical aspects of such initiatives are frequently ignored during the design, development, and implementation stages. This research highlighted the importance of considering sociotechnical factors when developing mHealth apps. The intended users for the mHealth technologies in this study are care professionals. Materials and Methods: Five semi-structured interviews and a pilot interview were conducted to identify user engagement facilitators and barriers. The interview data were analysed using NVivo. The Capability, Opportunity, Motivation - Behaviour (COM-B) model is then used to map the facilitators and barriers to mHealth app engagement, allowing researchers to better understand how users engage/disengage with mHealth apps. Results and Discussion: Capability facilitators included features that assist users in learning more about the app (e.g. a user manual and statistical data) as well as features that assist users in developing a routine. The lack of app skills and cognitive overload limit capability. While social connectedness and offline functionality were identified as facilitators of user engagement, non-user-friendly design and cultural dimensions were identified as barriers. Early user engagement and rewards were identified as motivational facilitators that influence user engagement. Furthermore, perceived non-utility and a lack of encouragement were identified as motivational barriers to engagement. Conclusion: Several factors were discovered across all COM-B model components that could be used to develop more engaging mHealth apps. Adopting a techno-centric approach that ignores sociotechnical factors can reduce user engagement. The design process engagement enhancement system (DECENT) framework was proposed based on the findings.

"The person in power told me to"-European PhD students' perspectives on guest authorship and good authorship practice.

Questionable authorship practices in scientific publishing are detrimental to research quality and management. The existing literature dealing with the prevalence, and perceptions, of such practices has focused on the medical sciences, and on experienced researchers. In contrast, this study investigated how younger researchers (PhD students) from across the faculties view fair authorship attribution, their experience with granting guest authorships to more powerful researchers and their reasons for doing so. Data for the study were collected in a survey of European PhD students. The final dataset included 1,336 participants from five European countries (Denmark, Hungary, Ireland, Portugal, and Switzerland) representing all major disciplines. Approximately three in ten reported that they had granted at least one guest authorship to "a person in power". Half of these indicated that they had done so because they had been told to do so by the person in power. Participants from the medical, natural and technical sciences were much more likely to state that they had granted a guest authorship than those from other faculties. We identified four general views about what is sufficient for co-authorship. There were two dominant views. The first (inclusive view) considered a broad range of contributions to merit co-authorship. The second (strongly writing-oriented) emphasised that co-authors must have written a piece of the manuscript text. The inclusive view dominated in the natural, technical, and medical sciences. Participants from other faculties were more evenly distributed between the inclusive and writing oriented view. Those with an inclusive view were most likely to indicate that they have granted a guest authorship. According to the experiences of our participants, questionable authorship practices are prevalent among early-career researchers, and they appear to be reinforced through a combination of coercive power relations and dominant norms in some research cultures, particularly in the natural, technical, and medical sciences.

Ethics and diversity in artificial intelligence policies, strategies and initiatives.

A burgeoning of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies in recent years has led to increased discussion about its potential to address many issues considered otherwise intractable, including those highlighted by the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and associated Sustainable Development Goals. In tandem with this growth in AI is an expanding body of documentation regarding how such advanced technologies should be governed and managed. Issued by a variety of sources and comprising frameworks, policies and guidelines, this body of work encompasses the legal, social, ethical and policy issues around AI. With at least 470 such documents identified, as of May 2021, in the Council of Europe's tracker of AI initiatives, questions are emerging around the diversity of views expressed, especially regarding the influence of the Global North or Euro-American perspectives. Our previous analysis of a corpus of largely grey literature discovered blind spots regarding both gender representation and perspectives from the Global South. Expanding on that work, this paper examines a significantly extended corpus, with a focus on the role of underrepresented groups in the wider AI discourse. We find that voices from the Global South and consideration of alternative ethical approaches are largely absent from the conversation. In light of the prominence of social, cultural and ethical perspectives from the Global North, this paper explores implications for the development of standards for ethical AI. Concluding by offering approaches to incorporate more diverse ethical viewpoints and beliefs, we call for increased consideration of power structures when developing AI ethics policies and standards within these alternative socio-cultural and socio-economic contexts.