A Smart Computing Framework Centered on User and Societal Empowerment to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The United Nations has developed 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to transform our world. Smart Computing aims to combine advances in Information and Communication Technologies including Internet of Things, cloud computing, mobile computing and social computing to create smart systems to make human life better. Smart Computing is providing a new approach to address many of the complex and challenging problems and is a valuable tool to support progress towards many SDGs. The lack of a suitable framework to handle the complex multi-disciplinary nature of these applications is hindering sustainable development. Based on a series of solutions we have developed for agriculture domain to address the first three SDGs (i.e., No Poverty, Zero Hunger, and Good Health and Wellbeing), we proposed a smart computing framework centered on user and societal empowerment. This framework consists of six dimensions: Economics, Domain Knowledge, Interaction Design, User Interface Design, User Empowerment and Societal Empowerment. As a way of validation, we adopted this framework to design a mobile-based information system to address “Hidden Hunger” in African countries and carried out a preliminary evaluation. Having the framework to guide our thinking and designing of the solution helped us to frame a holistic solution centered on user and societal empowerment. The proposed framework can be adopted to develop effective and innovative solutions to address many SDGs.