ChatGPT has been gaining immense popularity in various domains, including healthcare. Prior studies have explored ChatGPT's potential in managing certain health conditions and supporting clinicians in their practice but with a focus outside the Global South. We aim to fill this gap by understanding how ChatGPT supports the needs of marginalized populations residing in India around family planning. Rural Indian women have high unmet needs for family planning and spacing, and further, with the associated taboo, these women face challenges in seeking support. Thus, we focus on understanding how ChatGPT operates in the support-seeking network of postpartum women residing in resource-constrained areas of Northern India. We conducted Zoom sessions with 8 participants to understand their engagement with ChatGPT using screen-sharing. We observed how ChatGPT could/ could not adapt to our participants' language considerations, given their limited literacy levels. We studied our participants' experiences with framing questions to ChatGPT and identified their strategies for evaluating the correctness of ChatGPT's answers. Further, we gathered participants' struggles with the voice-conversation feature of ChatGPT, a feature traditionally seen as a way of bridging the literacy gap. Finally, we offer recommendations for making ChatGPT more useful among a low-resource population for their needs on a healthcare topic considered taboo in rural India.

Despite the Indian government's efforts to improve the awareness and uptake of family planning, rural women have an unmet need for family planning. Previous research, primarily in the medical domain, has offered counseling and informational support for family planning in a 1:1 manner and has explored non-technological-based peer support interventions for sexual and reproductive health in general. However, in HCI and CSCW, family planning remains an understudied topic. Thus, we aim to contribute to HCI knowledge by studying family planning among marginalized women in India. We explore the potential of technology-based peer support for family planning, given its high feasibility and acceptability for managing health conditions such as mental health illnesses and HIV. We conducted surveys, interviews, and a three-week field experiment with 30 rural Indian women to understand their engagement in a WhatsApp-based peer support group. Given the limited support within the family and from doctors and community health workers, we found the group to offer informational and emotional support to peers, help with local resources, and contribute to knowledge gain. Participants' feedback uncovered design suggestions such as the design of discussion prompts, the role of the moderator, and privacy levels. We contribute design considerations for designing a peer support group for family planning and discuss the need to design a suite of tools for family planning.

With a large and growing population, India has invested significantly over the last 70 years in its National Programme for Family Planning. Despite a sustained focus on family planning, uptake of family planning practices is limited, especially for rural women. Previous research posits an awareness-intention-usage gap among rural women, and in this work, we aim to understand this gap. We conducted three FGDs, surveys, and twenty interviews to explore rural Indian women's practices relating to contraceptive usage and adoption, support received within and outside of the family, factors influencing decision-making, and aspirations from technology to meet their needs. Our findings uncover limited knowledge about contraception and body, along with insufficient counseling support from families and healthcare workers. Our findings highlight participants' desire for experiential knowledge and present the privacy levels they need. Through our work, we aim to extend the postpartum ecology, with a focus on family planning, which remains under-studied in CSCW. In view of this, we discuss widening the ecology of care around family planning based on Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory.We also discuss the implications for designing family planning interventions that are mindful of women's needs.

Rapid and widespread vaccination played a major role in stemming the flow of Covid-19 spread. In India, the government enabled free and accessible vaccination for Covid-19. Although the general public responded positively, pregnant and breastfeeding women in rural areas hesitated about COVID-19 vaccination, leading to low vaccine uptake. In this work, we started with a formative study to understand pregnant and breastfeeding women's vaccine hesitancy. We found that the main barriers were poor knowledge about vaccines and limited agency around vaccination. We deployed a chatbot over WhatsApp to tackle their hesitancy through evidence-based vaccine education. We studied the chatbot engagement of 800+ participants over 23 days through chat logs, surveys, and interviews. We present participants' experiences and aspirations around chatbots. We found the chatbot to work well under a constrained network to build participants' vaccine-related knowledge and intentions. We further discuss the role of chatbots in healthcare beyond COVID-19 vaccination.

Women’s safety in public spaces has become a prime concern in India. Much of the academic and non-academic efforts have focused on developing technology-mediated solutions such as mobile apps and helplines for combating harassment experiences. However, there is an acute understanding of women’s perceptions and desires around these technological solutions. In this work, we investigate women’s perceptions around technological interventions dedicated to safety, the nature of support they seek from technology, and the characteristics they desire technology to embody to offer support. We draw on interviews with women across urban areas of India, demonstrating how they currently navigate unsafe experiences and also unpack their desires around technological solutions encompassing precautionary, reactionary, and healing support for navigating public spaces in the future. Finally, we conclude with implications focusing on the need for embedded technological solutions and going beyond victim-centric approaches to design technology for safety.

Iterative Budgeted Exponential Search (IBEX) is a general search algorithm that can limit the number of re-expansions performed in common problems like iterative-deepening tree search and search with inconsistent heuristics. IBEX has been adapted into a specific tree algorithm, Budgeted Tree Search (BTS), which behaves like IDA* when the problem instance is well-behaved but keeps the worst-case guarantees when problems are not well-behaved. The analogous algorithms on graphs, Budgeted Graph Search (BGS), do not have these same properties. This paper reformulates BGS into Efficient Budgeted Graph Search (BGSe), showing how to implement the algorithm so that it behaves identically to A* when problems are well-behaved, and retains the best-case performance otherwise. Experimental results validate the performance of BGSe on a range of theoretical and practical problem instances.

Online health communities provide a means for parents to engage with each other and seek and offer support. The parents' conversations in online communities also provide a lens into the parenting practices, challenges, and what role technology can play. Previous studies discuss the engagement of parents on online platforms related to specific childcare concerns. To understand the experiences of parents with online health communities, during the initial years of parenting, we conducted a study on the BabyCenter platform. It is a web forum that provides information on different aspects of early childhood development and offers peer-to-peer interaction. In this paper, we investigate the patterns of users' engagement for early childhood queries. Based on qualitative analysis of publicly available data on BabyCenter, 390 posts from January 2019 to June 2019, we find that the users primarily construct their knowledge, and engage in social interactions on the platform. We also find limited multimedia usage for expressing health concerns. We discuss design implications for parenting forums that meet the multi-faceted needs of parents during the early years of parenting.