Stress remains a significant health concern, yet commercial monitoring devices are often too expensive and complex for populations in developing countries. This research presents Spondon, a low-cost, multi-sensor wearable designed to detect stress in resource-constrained environments. Utilizing an ESP32 microcontroller with MAX30102, GSR, and temperature sensors, the device collects physiological data. We evaluated the system with 15 participants using the Stroop test to induce stress across baseline, task, and recovery phases. Statistical analysis confirmed a distinct 7.95% drop in HRV (RMSSD) during stress. The system achieved a 75.0% accuracy in binary acute stress detection (Baseline vs. Stress) using a Random Forest classifier with personalized baseline normalization. In addition, when evaluating continuous real-world monitoring across three physiological states (Baseline, Stress, and Recovery), Spondon achieved a 58.4% multi-class accuracy, successfully outperforming the 33.3% random-chance baseline. This work contributes a validated, accessible hardware platform and methodology, democratizing stress research for low-income communities and highlighting the importance of personalized, context-aware design in HCI.

Gender disparity in computing is a well-explored concern. To complement existing research, we use a non-intrusive exploration method of Fictional Inquiry. Followed by co-design workshop to explore solution approaches to increase women’s participation in computing. The study involved n = 48 Women in Computing (WiC) students in computing from four universities across Bangladesh. Participants shared their challenges and desired solutions which we analyzed using qualitative methods along with Natural Language Processing based tools to illustrate the problems from various perspectives while minimizing potential biases. The research team reflects on methodological decisions, policy implications, and the need for culturally and contextually appropriate tools and datasets to better support WiC research in resource-limited settings.

Collaboration and community building are crucial for equitable participation in research, especially in disability and accessibility research fields.Engaging with communities of disabled individuals helps understand their unique challenges, expectations, and needs, which should be reflected in assistive technology design.However, a gap exists between research in resource-rich societies and the practices of low-resource settings, where socio-economic and infrastructural constraints are often overlooked.Conversely, the innovation and sustainable solutions in these settings are often

Breast cancer, a major cancer for women in Bangladesh is considered in this work. Women require social approval prior to make active decision to act on investigation process and treatment process of breast cancer. We have conducted qualitative study on 12 groups consisting of 147 participants (107 female) with diverse age range, economic condition and location. Our initial effort to discuss about breast cancer faced barriers based on religion and social constraints. We look at the problem through feminist framing that would allow acceptable design considering ongoing barriers.

System level support is required for modern day Internet of Things (IoT) based applications. It opens up opportunities for low-cost solution approaches. We have developed a system solution for real time IoT based applications that allows real time access to location information and allows level of data abstraction for tracing location to be used in emergency situations. We have developed a wearable IoT solution to deal with the problem of sexual harassment on top of the system named Jalli. The application considers a developing country context. We hope that a system that is aware and sensitive about the resource limitations can bring out best possible system performance in the context of low resource regions.

Networking research often abstracts away the people who build, operate, and experience the Internet. Yet, human decisions shape what gets measured, which problems are prioritized, and how solutions are deployed. This paper argues that such human influence is foundational and deserves methodological attention. To do so, we discuss three well-known qualitative methods and approaches: participatory action research, ethnographic methods, and positionality as concrete ways of engaging with the social and operational realities that underlie technical systems. These approaches formalize processes that are commonly implicit in networking research, help surface questions that cannot be answered with traces alone, and make space for voices often left out of the research pipeline or are inadvertently concealed due to the lack of formal procedures to include them in our research methods. Ultimately, we argue for a broader understanding of legitimate, and sometimes informal, contributions to networking research—one that better reflects the human element of how the Internet is structured and is experienced.

Although Bangladesh is a country that values matchmaking and matchmakers greatly, online dating is a relatively new phenomenon that became popular only recently mostly among the young population. While anecdotal reports suggest a considerable number of individuals utilize online dating platforms in Bangladesh, a comprehensive investigation of their experiences and the potential impact on their well-being has yet to be conducted. Given the growing prevalence of online dating apps among young adults in Bangladesh, the present study aims to conduct in-depth interviews with a sample of 33 participants between the ages of 18 and 25 who actively use these platforms. The sample comprises 14 male and 19 female participants, each of whom has experience using online dating apps. By gaining insights into the experiences of young adult users of dating apps in Bangladesh and examining the effects of such platforms on their physical and mental well-being, the findings of this study highlight three areas: a) youth's intention to fight existing social norms, b) gender experiences relating to abuse and harassment in online dating platforms, c) alternative usage of online dating application space, particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic period. This study also seeks to raise awareness of online usage patterns among young adults in Bangladesh and identify potential interventions that may address any negative outcomes associated with excessive online activity.

Mobile Financial Services (MFS) has gained significant popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among marginalized and low-income, low-literate communities around the world. Such communities have not been traditionally considered while designing MFS services via smartphone apps or USSD services in featurephones. Financial constraints limit such end-users towards basic featurephones, where recent appstore support has made it possible to deploy app-based MFS solutions beyond USSD. This new featurephone platform is a relatively underexplored area in terms of addressing design issues related to aforementioned end-users while developing MFS solutions. Our work addresses this gap by presenting qualitative findings on barriers to technology access focused on MFS solutions in marginal communities. We present a prototype non-USSD, app-based solution on an appstore-supported featurephone platform designed via a human-centered approach. This work has the potential to increase the financial inclusivity of marginalized communities in cashless MFS transactions via low-cost, appstore-enabled featurephones.

This paper represents the experience of women from STEM and Non-STEM fields from the perspective of the rural area of Bangladesh. In Bangladesh, the social and cultural perspectives differ from one area to another. Previously no work has been done in Bangladesh from the perspective of the rural areas. We have come up with the motivation to work on this particular area to find out what barriers and challenges women face when they move to urban areas to study in the STEM field. From our findings, we have found some barriers from the Non-STEM field and opportunities from the STEM field. We have studied n=8 participants (5 Non-STEM, 3 STEM). Through their shared experience, they face barriers such as early marriage, excessive usage of social media, lack of support from teachers, peers, institutions, and family, challenge of Accommodation and security system outside of the hometown, and parents’ mentality towards children’s career. We have found opportunities such as parents’ educational background, female role models, and family support from the shared experience of STEM field participants. This research uncovered the barriers and opportunities that rural women face for entering the STEM field, which is very important to mitigate the barriers to entering the STEM field for rural women, which will help to create a new dimension in the HCI field. We believe that by following our work, future researchers might get motivated to contribute in this area, which will help the area to be considered as a big and an important part of the future investigation.

Due to usage of self-reported data which may contain biasness, the existing studies may not unveil the exact relation between academic grades and app categories such as Video. Additionally, the existing systems' requirement for data of prolonged period to predict grades may not facilitate early intervention to improve it. Thus, we presented an app that retrieves past 7 days' actual app usage data within a second (Mean=0.31s, SD=1.1s). Our analysis on 124 Bangladeshi students' real-time data demonstrates app usage sessions have a significant (p<0.05) negative association with CGPA. However, the Productivity and Books categories have a significant positive association whereas Video has a significant negative association. Moreover, the high and low CGPA holders have significantly different app usage behavior. Leveraging only the instantly accessed data, our machine learning model predicts CGPA within ±0.36 of the actual CGPA. We discuss the design implications that can be potential for students to improve grades.

Aggressive comments on social media negatively impact human life. Such offensive contents are responsible for depression and suicidal-related activities. Since online social networking is increasing day by day, the hate content is also increasing. Several investigations have been done on the domain of cyberbullying, cyberaggression, hate speech, etc. The majority of the inquiry has been done in the English language. Some languages (Hindi and Bangla) still lack proper investigations due to the lack of a dataset. This paper particularly worked on the Hindi, Bangla, and English datasets to detect aggressive comments and have shown a novel way of generating machine-translated data to resolve data unavailability issues. A fully machine-translated English dataset has been analyzed with the models such as the Long Short term memory model (LSTM), Bidirectional Long-short term memory model (BiLSTM), LSTM-Autoencoder, word2vec, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and generative pre-trained transformer (GPT-2) to make an observation on how the models perform on a machine-translated noisy dataset. We have compared the performance of using the noisy data with two more datasets such as raw data, which does not contain any noises, and semi-noisy data, which contains a certain amount of noisy data. We have classified both the raw and semi-noisy data using the aforementioned models. To evaluate the performance of the models, we have used evaluation metrics such as F1-score, accuracy, precision, and recall. We have achieved the highest accuracy on raw data using the gpt2 model, semi-noisy data using the BERT model, and fully machine-translated data using the BERT model. Since many languages do not have proper data availability, our approach will help researchers create machine-translated datasets for several analysis purposes.

A handwritten word recognition system comes with issues such as-lack of large and diverse datasets. It is necessary to resolve such issues since millions of official documents can be digitized by training deep learning models using a large and diverse dataset. Due to the lack of data availability, the trained model does not give the expected result. Thus, it has a high chance of showing poor results. This paper proposes a novel way of generating diverse handwritten word images using handwritten characters. The idea of our project is to train the BiLSTM-CTC architecture with generated synthetic handwritten words. The whole approach shows the process of generating two types of large and diverse handwritten word datasets: overlapped and non-overlapped. Since handwritten words also have issues like overlapping between two characters, we have tried to put it into our experimental part. We have also demonstrated the process of recognizing handwritten documents using the deep learning model. For the experiments, we have targeted the Bangla language, which lacks the handwritten word dataset, and can be followed for any language. Our approach is less complex and less costly than traditional GAN models. Finally, we have evaluated our model using Word Error Rate (WER), accuracy, f1-score, precision, and recall metrics. The model gives 39% WER score, 92% percent accuracy, and 92% percent f1 scores using non-overlapped data and 63% percent WER score, 83% percent accuracy, and 85% percent f1 scores using overlapped data.

Nowadays much of human interaction are taking place online and on social networking sites. These platforms often encourage people to use profile pictures as parts of their profiles. To understand digital identity construction across various user communities and to foster inclusive, diverse, and sustainable online interactions among them, it is imperative to understand the perception of different users groups about digital profile pictures (DPP). In order to explore this, we conducted a cross-border analysis on different social media platforms. Based on a quantitative study on more than 500 responses from a two-week survey of social media users from 29 different countries, we observed how people from various demographic groups perceive the importance of DPPs. Our results suggest that the perception is significantly different across some social factors and social media usage behavior.

Indigenous communities in Bangladesh are comparatively disadvantaged and face several barriers regarding rights. Access to technology and ICT can help indigenous communities open new economic, political, and social dimensions. The recent COVID-19 pandemic necessitated technology adoption for routine use, which is equally important for indigenous communities, but their technology adoption scenario remains unexplored in HCI research. Considering the research gap, we interviewed n=36 (Female 26 and Male 10) indigenous people from six different indigenous communities in Chattogarm and Sylhet divisions in Bangladesh. We found that they are strongly connected in communities, have independent technology access, and have no gender differences. They have a strong interest and eagerness to learn available technologies that help them in their professions, enrich their technical skills, communication, social participation, and expand the business. The study also revealed some challenges while using technology, but that did not negatively impact their usage. The study also discussed the community-centric strengths that helped them fight against the COVID-19 crisis and work for their development. This research impacts HCI literature, revealing the technology adoption scenarios of Indigenous communities in Bangladesh.

COVID-19 pandemic has impacted every sphere of students’ life along with forcing the transition to online education which brought a significant change in the learning habits of students. Different options like using file-sharing websites, online solvers etc. for cheating were exploited by the students in the tertiary education level. We explored the driving factors of cheating by the university students (Female = 17, Male = 28). We found that the stress during the pandemic; easy availability of online materials; and competitive nature of students impelled them to cheat. The students asserted that adapting these ways of cheating has affected their various significant skills as students. The conversations show that appropriate measures to motivate students to stop cheating must be taken. Our study contributes to the research community by exploring the different factors of cheating in online exams in Bangladesh.

This work presents a series of studies aiming to explore challenges and opportunities for women pursuing education or profession in the computing field. The work is based on the framework of Naila Kabeer considering access, agency and achievement as elements of women's empowerment. The study methods adopted included exploratory and qualitative analysis, whereas the data collection process incorporated two in-person surveys (N=120, F=85); ten one-to-one interviews (N=10, F=10); eight focus group discussions (N=46, F=34), four seminars covering more than 200 female members (N=239, F=239) and finally, two observations on more than one thousand participants of programming engagements (N=1402, F=1402); considering students, educators and other stakeholders as participants. Our research work exhibits dedicated efforts to ensure opportunities based on Naila Kabeer's framework for women in computing from Bangladesh.

In recent years, there has been a digital revolution in Bangladesh. We have explored digital storytelling among families as a way of sharing personal feelings, experiences regarding a terrorist attack that took place four years ago. Many of these feelings were not shared explicitly for various social, political reasons hampering freedom of expression. The goal of the work was to ensure social justice through ways to express feelings in a trusted platform. The research explored seventeen families over fifty stories using ethnographic study methods. Storytellers were able to express themselves through family-storytelling. We have used a simple tool named Golpokotha, a mobile application that enables secured storytelling that remains private unless the user prefers to share it with other family members. Contribution of this work lies in unveiling the overall picture exploring storytelling as a medium of expression from the trauma of a national crisis from a developing country perspective. We found that most of the participants went through silence, fear, humiliations, blame game, and stigma after the crisis which resisted expressing themselves through stories. Participants chose to overcome these barriers through their sense of responsibility, optimism, and social isolation. In the long run, their inspirations and reminiscence of innocent victims’ contributions motivated them to return to their normal life before the attack. Overall, our findings suggest liberating stories, designs, and policies to combat challenging times.

Smartphones are important for international development in the Global South. This paper explores how access to smartphone technologies promote women's agency for social change in these contexts by creating learning and livelihood opportunities and increasing connection with local market and service providers. The paper presents findings from a project which provided 200 Bangladeshi rural women farmers with smartphone technologies, training and support, and qualitatively investigated their ability to cope with geographic vulnerabilities, challenging market access, and social barriers. Reporting on a subset of these women's experiences, smartphone technologies helped these women gain better access to public agricultural extension and financial services, along with better acceptance from family and society. This, in turn, improved their dignity, confidence and sense of wellbeing. Insights will help ICT4D designers and development practitioners understand the importance of low-cost, bottom-up design inputs and social factors in future projects in similar developing country contexts.

We present findings from a three country study exploring the intersection between female intimate health and religious beliefs. Through a qualitative study with Muslim female populations in Pakistan, Bangladesh and Malaysia, three different Muslim majority contexts, we examine the deep impact Islamic beliefs have on female intimate health and well-being. Our study investigates the perceptions, attitudes and behaviours of Muslim women to their own intimate and sexual bodies through their experiences of menarche, marriage and reproduction and menopause. The intersection of religion and female sexual bodies and health is a neglected area within HCI and we highlight how inextricably specific Islamic values are linked with women’s reproductive health in Muslim communities. We further discuss the opportunities and challenges of designing technologies for religious, non-secular beliefs and values with the aim to improve intimate health practices amongst Muslim women and to broaden the scope of health design within HCI.

This paper aims to understand the educational settings of children with autism (CWA) in the specialized schools of Bangladesh from their parents' perspective. Sparse research in the same context to understand teachers' perceptions has been found. Though parents and teachers are an integral part of these children's educational experience, limited research has been conducted to deeply understand and facilitate parent-teacher relationships to offer CWA an improved learning experience in Bangladesh. Our in-depth qualitative study on urban parents (N=10) showed current challenges and opportunities relating to the schools designed for CWA. The work takes a closer look at the existing concerns and confirms that parent-teacher communication in autism schools here is a complex one because of other interferences (e.g., social, and familial stigma, lack of transparency from administrators, insufficient qualified teachers) as felt by the parents. Nevertheless, the remarkable coverage of cellular networks and increasing usage of mobile phones in Bangladesh places us in a unique position to expect positive changes by employing ICT, which we believe will open avenues for future researchers and guide them in implementing robust technology to support an improved learning environment for the CWA and their families.

South Asia faces one of the largest gender gaps online globally, and online safety is one of the main barriers to gender-equitable Internet access [GSMA, 2015]. To better understand the gendered risks and coping practices online in South Asia, we present a qualitative study of the online abuse experiences and coping practices of 199 people who identified as women and 6 NGO staff from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, using a feminist analysis. We found that a majority of our participants regularly contended with online abuse, experiencing three major abuse types: cyberstalking, impersonation, and personal content leakages. Consequences of abuse included emotional harm, reputation damage, and physical and sexual violence. Participants coped through informal channels rather than through technological protections or law enforcement. Altogether, our findings point to opportunities for designs, policies, and algorithms to improve women's safety online in South Asia.

Bangladesh has a rich history of storytelling for cultural, historical, social, and personal memories. Family stories in particular are powerful ways to reflect on relationships along with social values in a particular snapshot of time. Our goal is to derive insights for the design of culturally and value-sensitive digital storytelling tools for families in Bangladesh to preserve and share their stories. This paper describes ongoing work to understand the kinds of stories people tell, as well as the experience of listening to recorded stories.

The contemporary Rohingya crisis has forced more than half a million Rohingya refugees to flee and take shelter in Bangladesh and the worst sufferers of the incident are the women, children, and old aged refugees undoubtedly. They have fled the compunction to protect themselves from going through a long tedious migration to Bangladesh, which also includes pregnant women who have a high risk of giving birth and health safety concerns. These crises get deepened when they have to collect food competing with men, look after their children in the camps, and getting proper sanitation. But until the crisis gets solved permanently, through a qualitative study on around 117 female refugees currently living in the Refugee Camp this paper aims to unfold the mental health condition of the female refugees escaping from Rakhine State. We have proposed a technology solution so that manpower and equipment lacking can be compensated. Our findings are mostly concentrated on designing the mental health solution for the traumatized women who had to encounter their beloved ones being oppressed. We have examined them through the lens of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research principle and stepped towards suggesting a technology intervention to enhance their current mental state

Harassment, based on photos available on social media and other electronic media, has become a major problem in developing countries where internet usage has emerged without adaptation to privacy, awareness etc. We have developed a software sensing layer on top of existing software that would exploit the social connections and use that information to make sure certain images are revealed or not across group of people conceptualized as Softsense. A prototype implementation of the system is deployed named Facesense that is a small network for only photo sharing. Our proof of concept system has been deployed and used by students of a particular University in Bangladesh and after two weeks of usage, students have shared their views, concerns and experiences regarding the tool.

Resource scarcity prohibits developing country population in many ways from ubiquitous services. One such service is providing information about the best route for an ambulance in a crisis situation due to lack of proper road network information and GPS data. We have worked on a routing method in Dhaka, Bangladesh and utilized the power of crowd sourcing in times of resource scarcity. We share our challenges and opportunities that opened up followed by the challenges in this paper.

The fifth Sustainable Development Goal instituted by the United Nations in 2015 presents a call for gender equality, targeting the elimination of "discrimination, violence, and exploitation against women". We present an analysis of recent conversations within the Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD) community aiming to identify ways in which the community might approach conceptualizing, designing, and deploying ICTs to address vital concerns in this regard. We also articulate ways to frame and address key challenges moving forward through more holistic and sustainable approaches, greater engagement with diverse stakeholders, and evolved methodological toolkits.

Can we code better if we have our native language to code in? In a developing country like Bangladesh where most of the young learners are exposed to Bengali as their study medium, students often find it challenging to translate their thoughts into a foreign language. They need to focus more on the language rather than the logic or program solving. We have designed a native Bengali scripting language named Cha Script and have conducted a short study among users about its possibilit

Dropping out from school is a major problem among underprivileged children. A computer school designed to support these children named Computers Are Free for Everyone in short CAFFE, began three years ago in the hope to provide alternate source of living. some students of CAFFE later returned to regular schools, as they found hope and began to dream of a better life. The story of inspiration, motivation and hope from technology studies is shared here.

We present a distributed custom developed low cost sensing middleware named Shonabondhu that is able to handle flash flood in developing countries like Bangladesh.

Public sexual harassment has emerged as a large and growing concern in urban Bangladesh, with deep and damaging implications for gender security, justice, and rights of public participation. In this paper we describe an integrated program of ethnographic and design work meant to understand and address such problems. For one year we conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups around sexual harassment with women at three different universities in Dhaka. Based on this input, we developed "Protibadi", a web and mobile phone based application designed to report, map, and share women's stories around sexual harassment in public places. In August 2013 the system launched, user studies were conducted, and public responses were monitored to gauge reactions, strengths, and limits of the system. This paper describes the findings of our ethnographic and design-based work, and suggests lessons relevant to other HCI efforts to understand and design around difficult and culturally sensitive problems.

We consider an indoor assistive living center for elderly care which requires constant monitoring facility without hampering the privacy of the individuals. We use virtualization technique to provide assistance to individuals and monitor them as virtual units of location. We use a distributed server as information provider and handheld computational devices for local assistance for users.

The reliability of RFID systems depends on a number of factors including: RF interference, deployment environment, configuration of the readers, and placement of readers and tags. While RFID technology is improving rapidly, a reliable deployment of this technology is still a significant challenge impeding widespread adoption. This paper investigates system software solutions for achieving a highly reliable deployment that mitigates inherent unreliability in RFID technology. We have developed (1) a virtual reader abstraction to improve the potentially error-prone nature of reader generated data (2) a novel path abstraction to capture the logical flow of information among virtual readers. We have designed and implemented an RFID middleware: RF2ID (reliable framework for radio frequency identification) to organize and support queries over data streams in an efficient manner. Prototype implementation using both RFID readers and simulated readers using an empirical model of RFID readers show that RF2ID is able to provide high reliability and support path-based object detection.