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"Parar-daktar Understands My Problems Better": Disentangling the Challenges to Designing Better Access to Healthcare in Rural Bangladesh

Published: 07 November 2019 Publication History

Abstract

This paper discusses the issues that arise while designing better wellbeing support for a low-income rural population in Bangladesh. Through a four-month long ethnographic study, we explored how people in 13villages in southwestern Bangladesh accessed healthcare. Over the course of our fieldwork, we asked the participants about the existing healthcare services available to them and how they interacted with different ICT-based wellbeing support systems. Our findings show that insufficient resources, schedules, and the distant location of government-supported healthcare facilities were major challenges for the villagers. We also found that villagers' limited knowledge and mistrust of care-providing infrastructure block them from the benefits of available ICT-based supports and resources. Drawing on our findings from the field, we discuss possible alternative design directions for improving wellbeing support for rural Bangladeshis.

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cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction  Volume 3, Issue CSCW
November 2019
5026 pages
EISSN:2573-0142
DOI:10.1145/3371885
Issue’s Table of Contents
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Published: 07 November 2019
Published in PACMHCI Volume 3, Issue CSCW

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Author Tags

  1. access
  2. ethnography
  3. hci4d
  4. rural bangladesh
  5. wellbeing

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  • NSERC
  • Connaught Early Researcher Award

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  • (2023)Towards Intermediated Workflows for Hybrid TelemedicineProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580653(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
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