Abstract
Managing chronic disease is particularly challenging in the developing world, because every trip to a health center can translate to lost time and wages on the part of the patient. This problem is especially acute for tuberculosis patients, who in India are required to visit a center over 40 times in the course of a six-month treatment period. In this paper, we explore the role of a biometric attendance terminal in persuading patients to complete follow-up health visits in slum communities of New Delhi, India. The terminal, which enrolled over 2,300 patients across 25 centers during our 2 years of observation, uses biometric fingerprint scanning to ensure that tuberculosis patients receive and take medications on the right schedule. We evaluate the perceived impact of the terminal via interviews with 8 health workers, 4 center owners, and 23 patients. Our findings suggest that the biometric terminal helps to draw patients to the center, both by incentivizing health workers to convince patients to come, and by persuading patients that in-person visits are important.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Dell, N., Vaidyanathan, V., Medhi, I., Cutrell, E., Thies, W.: “Yours is Better!” Participant Response Bias in HCI. In: CHI (2012)
Farmer, T.: Factors influencing adherence to tuberculosis directly observed therapy: A review of the literature. Tech. rep., Toronto Public Health (2005)
Krueger, K., Ruby, D., Cooley, P., Montoya, B., Exarchos, A., Djojonegoro, B., Field, K.: Videophone utilization as an alternative to directly observed therapy for tuberculosis. The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease 14(6) (2010)
SonLa Study Group: Using a fingerprint recognition system in a vaccine trial to avoid misclassification. Bulletin of the WHO 85(1) (2007)
World Health Organization: Global Tuberculosis Control 2009: Epidemiology, Strategy, Financing (2009)
McDonald, H.P., Garg, A.X., Haynes, R.B.: Interventions to enhance patient adherence to medication prescriptions. Journal of the American Medical Association 288(22) (2002)
Moulding, T.S., Caymittes, M.: Managing medication compliance of tuberculosis patients in haiti with medication monitors. The International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease 6(4) (2002)
Nair, D.M., George, A., Chacko, K.T.: Tuberculosis in Bombay: New Insights from Poor Urban Patients. Health Policy and Planning 12(1) (1997)
Osterberg, L., Blaschke, T.: Adherence to medication. New England Journal of Medicine 353 (2005)
Paik, M., Samdaria, N., Gupta, A., Weber, J., Bhatnagar, N., Batra, S., Bhardwaj, M., Thies, W.: A Biometric Attendance Terminal and its Application to Health Programs in India. In: ACM Workshop on Networking and Systems for Developing Regions (2010)
Rao, M.: UID and Public Health: Specious Claims. eSS/Newsclick Policy Matters, Rao, UID health (February 2011)
Serwaa-Bonsu, A., Herbst, A.J., Reniers, G., Ijaa, W., Clark, B., Kabudula, C., Sankoh, O.: First experiences in the implementation of biometric technology to link data from health and demographic surveillance systems with health facility data. Global Health Action 3 (2010)
Sterns, A.A., Mayhorn, C.B.: Persuasive Pillboxes: Improving Medication Adherence with Personal Digital Assistants. In: IJsselsteijn, W.A., de Kort, Y.A.W., Midden, C., Eggen, B., van den Hoven, E. (eds.) PERSUASIVE 2006. LNCS, vol. 3962, pp. 195–198. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
UID and Public Health. UIDAI Working Paper, http://bit.ly/qwXXgw
Weibel, D., Schelling, E., Bonfoh, B., Utzinger, J., Hattendorf, J., Abdoulaye, M., Madjiade, T., Zinsstag, J.: Demographic and health surveillance of mobile pastoralists in Chad: Integration of biometric fingerprint identification into a geographical information system. Geospatial Health 3(1) (2008)
Yu, K.L., Chen, C.C., Chang, W.S., Juma, H., Chang, C.S.: Fingerprint identification of AIDS patients on ART. Lancet 365 (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bhatnagar, N. et al. (2012). Biometric Monitoring as a Persuasive Technology: Ensuring Patients Visit Health Centers in India’s Slums. In: Bang, M., Ragnemalm, E.L. (eds) Persuasive Technology. Design for Health and Safety. PERSUASIVE 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7284. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31037-9_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31037-9_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31036-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31037-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)