Healthcare IVRS for Non-Tech-Savvy Users

The rapid increase in mobile penetration has cut through the literacy barriers even in the developing countries. It has paved a way for technological interventions in healthcare domain, using the mobile platform such as Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS). Over the past few years, IVRS have been looked upon as an intervention in frequent and non-frequent but time-critical health support systems for chronic diseases. We present an IVRS-based solution for a low-resource setting, to ameliorate the problems of People living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA). We discuss the strategy to deal with frequently and non-frequently used menus. We describe a style of interface added especially to meet the problem of selection of multiple and overlapping options. We highlight the use of flat messages (like health tips) and IRV-based quiz to provide information and shape users' understanding of the disease. We describe and discuss comparative study of usability evaluations of our system conducted with low literate rural users (independent of their HIV/AIDS status) in two villages of Maharashtra (India) in Marathi, the local language. Training provided to the users overcomes the problem of inability of abstract thinking in low literate users.

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