ICT Acceptance for Information Seeking Amongst Pre- and Postnatal Women in Urban Slums

This paper reports findings from a study aimed to understand how urban poor pre- and postnatal women in India use ICT tools like mobile phones for information seeking. The study was divided in 2 phases. In phase 1, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 66 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slums located in 4 cities in India. In phase 2, we conducted a survey with 102 pre- and postnatal women from urban poor slum located in 9 cities in India. The aim was to understand care giving during and after pregnancy, nutrition, terminology used during pregnancy, and interpretation of visual material. This paper summarizes the findings, which include the importance of the use of appropriate terminology to design content in a multilingual country, identifying triggers for information seeking behaviour, and approaches to technology acceptance for information seeking. Based on these findings, we make suggestions for design of future ICT-based interventions in resource constraint settings.