Shaping social beliefs: A community sensitive health information system for rural India

Abstract

This paper presents critical issues concerning the community sensitive personal health information system in rural India, from an industrial design perspective. Literature in current ICT based applications, point to the fact that, current efforts related to personal health information dissemination have gained limited acceptance at community level among rural population. This is probably due to limited understanding of community sensitive information needs, societal structure and user beliefs of the rural community. To understand the underlying social values and users beliefs related to personal health information (PHI), a preliminary study including field interviews and review of currently deployed ICT projects was conducted. This paper presents the preliminary results, indicating several social and design challenges towards the development of a PHI system. Further the paper proposes a design framework, which includes design as a primary tool to shape existing user beliefs to positively influence the technology acceptance process of PHI system. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.