Healthcare facility is scarce for rural women in the developing world. The situation is worse for patients who are suffering from diseases that require long-term feedback-oriented monitoring such as breast cancer. Lack of motivation to go to the health centers on patients' side due to sociocultural barriers, financial restrictions and transportation hazards results in inadequate data for proper assessment. Fortunately, mobile phones have penetrated the masses even in rural communities of the developing countries. In this scenario, a mobile phone-based remote symptom monitoring system (RSMS) with inspirational videos can serve the purpose of both patients and doctors. Here, we present the findings of our field study conducted on 39 breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh. Based on the results of extensive field studies, we have categorized the challenges faced by patients in different phases of the treatment process. As a solution, we have designed, developed and deployed e-ESAS-the first mobile-based RSMS in rural context. Along with the detail need assessment of such a system, we describe the evolution of e-ESAS and the deployment results. We have included the unique and useful design lessons that we learned as e-ESAS evolved through participatory design process. The findings show how e-ESAS addresses NOT THE PUBLISHED VERSION; this is the author's final, peer-reviewed manuscript. The published version may be accessed by following the link in the citation at the bottom of the page.

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Context awareness is just beginning to revolutionize the ways we interact with networked devices. In order for context awareness to flourish, especially in a pervasive environment, users must be certain that their privacy is respected. Privacy in pervasive online community depends on the level of granularity of the provided information, user's relation to possible recipients, and the possible usage of user's data. Conventional privacy preservation techniques are not suitable for these pervasive applications. The notion of this paper is to present the preliminary results of using a unique architecture of obfuscation techniques to preserve users' privacy in e-community based applications. This paper describes our current work in developing a novel Privacy-sensitive architecture for Context Obfuscation (PCO) for privacy preservation in pervasive online community based applications. More specifically, PCO safeguards a user's privacy by generalizing the contextual data (e.g. the user's current activity) provided to the applications and distributed to the user's peers. To support multiple levels of granularity for the released contextual data, the obfuscation procedure uses an ontological description that states the granularity of object type instances. We have developed and evaluated a contextual instant messaging application (PCO application) in Android platform that incorporates level-based privacy of the user's contextual information. We also evaluate our prototype application through user evaluation survey.