‘Oshudh Poro’: A Mobile-Phone Application to Support Low-literate Rural Bangladeshi People's Personal Medication Management [Poster]

Inability to read and understand the information on medicine packaging is a problem for many people across the world, especially in the Global South. As a solution to this, many of them reportedly often memorize the names and looks of their medicines. However, they often fail to distinguish between registered and unregistered/duplicate medicines and consume them without realizing, which further deteriorates their health conditions and even may lead to death. They frequently seek help from family members and friends to supervise their medicine intake, however, such helpers might still struggle to distinguish between registered and duplicate medicines if the texts written on the medicine's packaging seem similar. To address this problem, we designed an android mobile-phone application, gOshudh Poro' scans medicine packaging, captures images of its unique registry number, matches the number to a database of registered medicines in the country, retrieves the relevant details upon finding the medicine as registered, converts them to Bengali audios and plays the details aloud. Thus, the users know which medicine are they taking, whether it is registered or unregistered and its details. Thus, low-literate users would gain more autonomy in managing their personal medication. We argue that this application would lead wellbeing-HCI to more sustainable design solutions as the application is built on existing skills of users and integrates only the existing features available to the intended users. Thus, our design contributes to wellbeing-HCI, sustainability research, and HCI4D.