Pragati

Community Health Workers (CHWs), specially Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) play a significant role in improving healthcare services in developing countries like India. Although ASHAs are key-actors influencing rural health care, they are inefficiently trained. This leads to sub-optimal knowledge and skill sets, hence poor information delivery among community members. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Pragati, a mobile-based Head Mounted Display (HMD) enabled Virtual Reality (VR) interface for training ASHAs. A user study conducted among 19 users revealed significant learnability and self-efficacy post-Pragati usage. Further, we conducted a between-group study among 57 CHWs to assess effects of 3 platforms (i) Pragati, (ii) mobile phone-based traditional videos and (iii) mobile phone-based 360-degree video on measures of learnability, self-efficacy, engagement, and presence. The results showed no impact of the platform for learnability and self-efficacy, whereas a significant increase in engagement and presence was observed for Pragati.