New ICT solution for providing health care services to beggars of Bangladesh

Abstract

Beggars are deprived of all the fundamental human rights, including healthcare support that often engenders consequences minor to severe, if not lethal, to this people. Bangladesh, having a significant number of beggars living mostly in its capital Dhaka, is no difference. However, one prominent difference observed for these beggars compared to similar people in other parts in the world (for example homeless people in the USA) is that technology penetration is near to zero for the beggars in Bangladesh, which we confirm through our field study. Thus, the commonly adopted technology-based technique (such as smartphone app-based techniques) for providing healthcare supports to such people is not a feasible one even to ponder. However, there exist different healthcare services in Bangladesh intended for the beggars and other similar poor people, which mostly remain obscure to the intended communities. This situation presents a unique challenge in the realm of HCI, where we need to bridge a substantial physical gap between the applicable healthcare services and their intended recipients (beggars in our context). We solve this problem through a carefully-crafted solution (named as “Dakter Bari", which means “Home of a doctor" in English) that is tailored to the applicable ecosystem of the context. We design the solution as per our field study integrating the notions of participatory design and Value Sensitive Design, develop it, and deploy in real cases. Usage of the system for more than six months demonstrates its efficacy in bridging the gap through a technosocial solution going beyond a technology-only approach. Moreover, based on our analyses and findings, we present a new behavior model (going beyond the Fogg’s Behavior Model) that should be applicable to such technosocial solutions.