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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.

This paper presents Persuasive Health Information systems (PHIs), which has been deployed over a period of eight months at a pilot site to improve health information dissemination among rural women in India. The design process of the PHI integrates social cues from the persuasive technology and the theory of planned behaviour for shaping social beliefs and health practices of rural women. Two field studies were conducted to design and evaluate the PHIs. The results from study one revealed social beliefs and practices related to primary health that formulated the design requirements for the PHIs. On the basis of these requirements, the social beliefs were addressed by applying persuasive social cues to the design of the form, content, and interaction of the PHIs. The results from study two involved comparative engagement between PHIs and an existing health information system supported by a local nongovernmental organization. The results indicate that application of persuasive technology can persuade the rural women to change their existing social beliefs and health practices in a positive manner. This paper contributes by providing theoretical understanding of what restricts the information transfer among rural women in terms of health care practices and how it can be addressed by applying persuasive technology for the design of health information systems. We hope that health practitioners, ICT developers and the design community would benefit from this approach in developing information systems for health care, e-government, and education in a rural context.

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