Extremely impoverished people (known as Beggars or Homeless, depending on where they live), are a group of vulnerable citizens that are deprived of necessary healthcare support, consequences of which can be minor to severe, and in some cases, fatal. Bangladesh, having a significant number of them, is no different. One noticeable difference of these beggars compared to similar communities in other parts of the world (e.g., homeless people in the USA) is that technology penetration is near-to-zero for beggars in Bangladesh, which we confirm through our field study. Thus, technology-based (such as app-based, mHealth, etc.) solutions for providing healthcare support, which maybe possible in advanced countries, is not possible in lower-income countries like Bangladesh. However, there does exist multiple healthcare services in Bangladesh intended for beggars and similar communities, which mostly remain underused by the intended population. This scenario presents a unique challenge, where there is a geographical gap between healthcare services and their intended recipients (beggars in our context). We tackle this problem through a carefully-crafted solution Dakter Bari (meaning ``Home of a doctor" in English), that is tailored to the application ecosystem in this context. We extract critical insights from our field study with (N=70) beggars, and from findings, create a pathway for availing lower-cost healthcare solutions using intermediaries. We also conduct field studies with (N=71) possible intermediary partners and (N=10) hospitals to identify the challenges and possibilities of such intermediary based solutions. With insights gained through these field studies, we then design, iteratively develop, deploy, and user-test such a solution in real cases. To penetrate the system further, we design and deploy posters that are easy to understand for the beggar community and report the findings from the system usage data. The usage of the system for more than six months registers 255 service requests and demonstrates its efficacy in bridging the gap we identified through our study.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3449118
The 24th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing