Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT for Supporting Family Planning Needs of Postpartum Women in Resource-constrained Areas of India

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.