ICT Acceptance for Information Seeking Amongst Pre- and Postnatal Women in Urban Slums

This paper reports findings from a study aimed to understand how urban poor pre- and postnatal women in India use ICT tools like mobile phones for information seeking. The study was divided in 2 phases. In phase 1, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 66 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slums located in 4 cities in India. In phase 2, we conducted a survey with 102 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slum located in 9 cities in India. The aim was to understand care giving during and after pregnancy, nutrition, terminology used during pregnancy, and interpretation of visual material. This paper summarizes the findings, which include the importance of the use of appropriate terminology to design content in a multilingual country, identifying triggers for information seeking behaviour, and approaches to technology acceptance for information seeking. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for design of future ICT-based interventions in resource constraint settings.

[1]  Sundeep Sahay,et al.  Are we Building a Better World with ICTs? Empirically Examining this Question in the Domain of Public Health in India , 2016, Inf. Technol. Dev..

[2]  John F. Canny,et al.  Mobile-izing health workers in rural India , 2010, CHI.

[3]  Nervo Verdezoto,et al.  Towards Enhancing Everyday Pregnancy Care: Reflections from Community Stakeholders in South India , 2018, IndiaHCI.

[4]  C. Kyobutungi,et al.  Health and health-related indicators in slum, rural, and urban communities: a comparative analysis. , 2016, Global health action.

[5]  M. Hilbert,et al.  Digital Gender Divide or Technologically Empowered Women in Developing Countries? A Typical Case of Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics , 2011 .

[6]  Sharad Iyengar,et al.  Maternal Health Situation in India: A Case Study , 2009, Journal of health, population, and nutrition.

[7]  Rajesh Kumar Rai,et al.  Determinants of Maternity Care Services Utilization among Married Adolescents in Rural India , 2012, PloS one.

[8]  Ramakrishnan Ganesan,et al.  Role of Information and Communication Technologies in Accelerating the Adoption of Healthy Behaviors , 2010 .

[9]  Stephen S. Intille,et al.  A new research challenge: persuasive technology to motivate healthy aging , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Information Technology in Biomedicine.

[10]  Leslie Curry,et al.  The World Health Organization Code and exclusive breastfeeding in China, India, and Vietnam , 2018, Maternal & child nutrition.

[11]  Arul Chib,et al.  The Hope of Mobile Phones in Indian Rural Healthcare , 2012 .

[12]  Tigest Tamrat,et al.  Special Delivery: An Analysis of mHealth in Maternal and Newborn Health Programs and Their Outcomes Around the World , 2012, Maternal and Child Health Journal.

[13]  Li Lin,et al.  A model for the adoption of ICT by health workers in Africa , 2012, Int. J. Medical Informatics.

[14]  Catherine Kyobutungi,et al.  Health and health-related indicators in slum, rural, and urban communities: a comparative analysis , 2016, Global health action.