Abstract-This article introduces an ICT based transport system called Social Services on Wheels (SSW) that provides multiple social services especially healthcare delivery to the unreached communities. A community car brings healthcare devices, PC and team members (Village entrepreneur, healthcare worker, IT assistant) to pre-allocated service points within villages. The measuring devices and applications are supported by a back-end data operations office using Internet. The villager walks to the nearest service point and interfaces with the healthcare and information systems. Social Service on Wheels has been tested in two rural villages in Bangladesh during October 2013 to February 2014. The results showed that 4,496 long distance trips were reduced because the villagers were satisfactorily served without leaving theirvillage. The villagers tended to associate the delivery of six social services with the Toyota community car rather than the SSW teams who performed the tests or helped with IT issues. SSW empowered the community by hiring locally and training the SSW teams. The sustainability of SSW project is a challenging area and is still being investigated.Index Terms-Mobility, access to social service, resource sharing, village centered transportation.
I. INTRODUCTION1 billion of the world population are unreached in terms of access to quality healthcare services [1]. Globally, approximately one half of the population lives in rural areas, but less than 38% of the nurses and less than 25% of the physicians work there [2]. On the other hand, prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), such as heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic kidney diseases, and diabetes mellitus, has been increasing rapidly worldwide. The World Health Organization reported that NCDs accounted for 63% (36 million) of the 57 million global deaths in 2008 and approximately 80% of all NCD-related deaths occurred in low-and middle-income countries [3]. In these developing countries, 29% of NCD-related deaths occurred in the working-age group (in people aged <60 years). This rate is Manuscript received January 30, 2015; revised April 28, 2015 higher than that for high-income countries (13%) and contributes to declining labor productivity in developing countries. The total number of annual NCD-related deaths is estimated to reach 55 million by 2030 [4]. NCDs are no longer just a problem for high-income countries, but a problem that affects all countries.Furthermore, utilization of healthcare services in rural areas is much lower as compared to urban areas. While there are a number of possible explanations for these differences, such as differences in the number of medical practitioners available, the longer travel distances and fewer transportation options available in rural areas are significant factors [5]. The environment of rural communities in developing countries is characterized by an absence of public transport, poor access to welfare services and informal trade markets [6]. In addition, there are few local sustainable business m...
