What do you enjoy eating?

As part of my elective project I'm working on a mobile phone app with the team here to help with burn care in rural Nepal. The idea behind the app is a simple questionnaire that can be used to follow up patients with scars. There are a few of these questionnaires that exist already but none take into account the daily function of the patient. So for example if you have a scar over your elbow, then bending your arm is difficult and you may not be able to feed, wash or dress yourself.

So the app is a simple way of asking these questions, with the aid of one of those smiley face scales for rating their pain.

 

The picture below is of a patient I attempted to trial the app on. This 70 year old lady is Newari, and so speaks a completely different dialect of Nepali that none of the team spoke (think listening to Welsh as an English speaker). Luckily their son was able to translate a little, however some of the questions didn't really work.

For example, rating pain doesn't seem to be something people here understand. So when I showed her the smiley faces she just laughed and eventually said no pain at all (she had a scar in her popliteal fossa from a previous burn). But then I moved on to asking "do you need help to feed yourself". I think this was translated as "what do you eat" and so she started explaining in detail all about the rice and chicken and vegetables that she ate, with confused expression on her face. Her confusion grew as I started to ask about "do you need help to wash?" and "can you dress yourself?". Which again were translated as "how do you wash" and "what do you dress in?". Not very useful, but we did have a great time laughing about it.