A Study of Outbound Automated Call Preferences for DOTS Adherence in Rural India

Abstract

Outbound automated calls present an excellent opportunity to deliver messages among low-technology literate users from a resource-constrained environment, such as rural India. While automated calls have been used for various purposes in rural settings, sufficient research has not been done to understand the motivation for attending the calls, preferred contents, call duration, time, preferred gender of voice, content learnability and preference of automated call over SMS for information delivery. In this paper, we present a study conducted among 40 early-stage Tuberculosis (TB) positive patients to investigate content learnability and preferences of outbound automated calls aimed to increase DOTS adherence. The results indicate the demand for easily actionable contents, evenings as preferred time and less than 5 min as ideal call duration for automated calls. We found the preference of automated calls over SMS for information delivery. We also observed a significant increase in learnability among participants who listened to the complete call as compared to participants who did not. We present these findings in detail and suitable recommendations.