Home> Archive> 2016> Volume 6 Number 8 (Aug. 2016)
IJSSH 2016 Vol.6(8): 594-599 ISSN: 2010-3646
DOI: 10.7763/IJSSH.2016.V6.716

Healthcare Service on Wheels for Unreached Communities

Takuzo Osugi, Jecinta Kamau, Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave, Abdullah Emran, and Ashir Ahmed

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.

Takuzo Osugi is with Institute for Academic Initiatives 1st Division, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan and Grameen Communications Specialist Researcher, Bangladesh (e-mail: thosugi@cbi.osaka-u.ac.jp)
Jecinta Kamau is with the Department of Advanced Information Technology, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave is with Institute of Decision Science for a Sustainable Society, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan.
Abdullah Emran is with Grameen Communications, Bangladesh. Ashir Ahmed is with the Department of Advanced Information Technology, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan. He is also with Grameen Communications, Bangladesh.

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Cite: Takuzo Osugi, Jecinta Kamau, Andrew Rebeiro-Hargrave, Abdullah Emran, and Ashir Ahmed, "Healthcare Service on Wheels for Unreached Communities," International Journal of Social Science and Humanity vol. 6, no. 8, pp. 594-599, 2016.

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