Use of mobile phones by non-literate and semi-literate people: A systematic literature review

This paper reports on a systematic literature review conducted to discover the state of research concerning the use of mobile phones by non-/semi-literate users. This is an important and growing area of research because mobile phone users in the developing world represent 73% of global subscriptions, and, of the 796 million people around the world who cannot read or write, 98% live in the developing countries. Mobile phones offer low-literate people critical access to information and services. By understanding how these people currently use mobile phones, we can develop better ways to meet their needs. To learn what research has been done in this area, we conducted a systematic literature review to identify good-quality, evidence-based studies that included design recommendations. This paper will describe the detailed selection process and characterize the corpus articles along a number of dimensions: type of use, locale of the study, domain, research methodology, and design recommendations. Then the paper will present a thematic analysis of the usages identified in those papers and discuss the related design recommendations.