“Time Accounting Systems (TAS)”: Investigating the potential of Information Technology for the ageing society in Bangladesh

This research aims to explore the potential of Information Technology for the ageing societies in developing countries. More particularly, it investigates whether an ICT based peer to peer service exchange tool, Time Accounting System (TAS), would be useful and acceptable in Bangladesh and how can this technology be introduced there which might help in elderly care, social inclusion, and informal employment. We considered the design approaches for the developing countries and we adopted the main iterative loop of a User-centered Approach in order to reach our objectives. We developed a prototype of a TAS based on the requirements elicited from the analysis of the data collected through both quantitative and qualitative studies. Then we validated the prototype through another qualitative study and usability testing. The more general contribution of this research is to have investigated a problem that, to our knowledge, was not yet taken into account. In this respect, it opens a new line of research within the stream that investigates the potentialities, the limitations and the constraints of the adoption of collaborative technologies in developing countries. From the theoretical perspective, the research design guiding the undertaken investigation is an application of the Postcolonial Computing approach. Moreover, it is an empirical proof of its validity in terms of “productivity”, although the design trajectory could not reach its full accomplishment. Our experience shows that in new situations like the one dealt with in our research the classic methodological approaches and their tools cannot be taken for granted and directly applied. Only the general foundation principles, like the central role of the users in design and the iterative nature of the latter to refine the features of the solution as in our case, can be preserved. The methods and tools have to be combined and adapted to cope with the complexity and the constraints of the target setting, in our case a wide number of people in Bangladesh for the survey and the focus groups among the Bangladeshi people in Bangladesh and Italy. From the application level, the hybridization proposed by the Postcolonial Computing approach was productive also in terms of some functionalities that are innovative with respect to those incorporated in the TAS applications that are in use in the western countries. The habits of the population living in the considered urban areas in Bangladesh let emerge an innovative requirement for a TAS application: the application should allow one to transfer credits across communities living in an urban area in order to extend the usefulness of the system to people who commute, typically for work sake. On the other hand, the Bangladeshi people living in Italy extended this requirement to allow the interaction among TAS systems across the continents. The leading idea was the same, i.e. is some form of TAS systems integration, however at a different scale. This integration could make sense also for the populations living in western countries as mobility is increasing and TAS applications deployed there could offer a better both to native people and to the migrants as these latter could help their relatives and friends in their native countries: a very interesting possibility due to the migration phenomenon and the related problem of integration that is crucial in these days, especially in Europe.