EDakterBari: A human-centered solution enabling online medical consultation and information dissemination for resource-constrained communities in Bangladesh

Abstract

A well-accessible healthcare system is an important measure of the progress of a country, as access to adequate healthcare is one of everyone's very basic human rights. When a community lives below the poverty line, unfortunately, it gets deprived of the basic human rights like healthcare, which is a reality to many resource-constrained communities around the world. The number of such resource-constrained communities in developing countries is large. Orphans present a prominent example in this regard in the context of Bangladesh. Orphans suffer greatly from many diseases due to their resource-constrained environment of livings and they are unable to take a minimum care of their own health. Their lack of resources, inadequate literacy skills, and limited (or no) access to technology leave them in such a position that they are ignorant of healthcare services available for them directly or through technological means. Considering all these unavoidable real aspects and the fact that such resource-constrained communities are very little focused in the literature for aiding them in getting bare minimum healthcare services, in this study, we leverage technology and relevant appropriate intermediaries to bridge the gap between the orphans in the orphanages and healthcare services offered by medical doctors. To accomplish so, we conduct a series of field studies over the intended communities. The orphanage teachers and administrators, being in proximity, are the most effective ones to operate as intermediaries for the orphan children, as revealed through our field studies. Therefore, we use these intermediaries to help the orphans to get basic healthcare services via an Android healthcare app called ‘Shastho-sheba’. We also use our findings from the field study to specifically tailor and modify the application for intermediaries to use on behalf of the orphans so that health professionals can provide direct healthcare services to them over the Internet. Finally, we look into our proposed techno-social solution in the context of HCI to ensure that the service is used more effectively.