DIAL: Design Inclusion and Access Lab

Research

Research in Collaboration

Participatory Design-based Evaluation, Improvement & Deployment of Communication Application for Connecting Parents and Teachers of Children with Autism 2026

Updates are coming soon

Understanding Mental Health Status & Tech Intervention Design for Tertiary-level Students 2025

Understanding the mental health of young adults through various methods and designing technology interventions that detect mental health issues in a minimalistic manner, with a particular emphasis on young females

We Are Just One Step Away: Embracing 4IR with a Realistic Transitional Framework Rooted in the Manufacturing Practices of RMG Industries in Bangladesh 2025

This paper investigates how Bangladesh’s RMG industries can realistically transition toward 4IR by identifying human, technological, and organizational frictions in automation adoption. Using a mixed-method study of 75 participants across four factories, it reveals gaps in workforce readiness, system compatibility, and decision-making around technology demand. The study proposes a flexible transitional framework that aligns automation stages with human skills and existing manufacturing practices. Overall, it reframes 4IR adoption as a gradual, people-centered transformation rather than a purely technological leap.

Shonchalon: An Approach for Observing Rehabilitation of Post-Stroke Patients’ Upper Limb Complications Using Low-Cost Sensors 2025

Stroke often causes long-term upper limb disability, especially challenging in developing countries like Bangladesh where rural patients lack regular professional rehabilitation. Clinic-based therapy is costly (27,852 BDT/month) compared to average household income (15,988 BDT), limiting access. This project develops a low-cost, lightweight wearable device using an IMU sensor and ESP32 BLE board to support five essential physiotherapy exercises. With real-time feedback on exercise accuracy, the device offers an affordable, practical solution to improve home rehabilitation and speed recovery for stroke patients.

Multimodal Data-Driven Exploration of Emotional Eruption of the July Movement 2024

A student-led movement to reform the quota system in government jobs turned into a mass uprising as the July Revolution and resulted in the fall of a regime. We use a multimodal method to explore the emotional eruption among the protesters.

Social Chatbot for Addressing the Mental Health of University Students in Bangladesh 2024

This exploratory study seeks to understand university students’ perceptions of mental health chatbots and to identify their specific support needs. These insights are then used for designing a social chatbot that functions as an empathetic and non-judgmental conversational companion, capable of identifying indicators of depression and suicidal ideation through text-based interactions.

Understanding the sociocultural challenges and opportunities for affordable wearables to support poststroke upper-limb rehabilitation: Qualitative study 2024

Stroke patients or patients with acquired brain injury (ABI) often have severe health complications. Sometimes, upper limbs are affected, causing weakness and function impairment resulting in difficulty performing everyday tasks. Rehabilitation regimes can help these patients regain upper limb function. However, in countries like Bangladesh, rehabilitation access can be limited and costly, causing patients to turn away from rehabilitation. This causes patients to lose the opportunity to undergo optimal recovery. In this project, we aim to develop a low-cost wearable to aid the upper limb rehabilitation process through technology. Ideally, the final prototype of the wearable would be able to recognize exercises for rehabilitation and give feedback to the user.

Nobody Can See Us: An Overview of Online Dating Site Experiences 2023

This study explores the experiences and well-being of young adults in Bangladesh using online dating platforms through interviews with 33 participants aged 18 to 25. It highlights three key areas: challenging social norms, gender-specific experiences of abuse and harassment, and alternative uses of dating apps during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research aims to raise awareness of online dating patterns among Bangladeshi youth and suggests interventions for potential negative outcomes from excessive online activity.

Google Research 2023

Updates are coming soon

Alor Akash: Intersections of Gender and Technology in Bangladesh

The research project aims to understand the intersection of technology usage and financial inclusion through a deepened understanding of barriers and opportunities for advancing women's financial inclusion, including the experiences and perceptions of low-income women from across various regions and occupations.

Google Gender and Technology Research in Bangladesh 2017

South Asian women has less access in personal devices than women in other regions in the world. Culturally, they have to share mobile phones with family members and that their digital activities has to be monitored by family members. These practices reduce the privacy online for women. From this mindset, We studied 195 people all around India, Bangladesh (N=55) and Pakistan to understand the social norms and values in the South Asian countries women and trying to improve the privacy controls, by offering or providing algorithmic suggestions.

NSU-CTRG FUNDS (2020-2026)

Fund 1 - Supporting Parent of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder during Covid-19

Fund 2 - Remote Sensing and GIS based approach to Understand the Padma River Erosion: A Case Study of Naria erosion downstream of Padma bridge

Fund 3 - Participatory Design-based Evaluation, Improvement & Deployment of Communication Application for Connecting Parents and Teachers of Children with Autism

Fund 4 - Alternative Credit Scoring for the Credit Invisibles of Bangladesh

Fund 5 - Social Chatbot for Addressing the Mental Health of University Students in Bangladesh.

Fund 6 - An Assistive Technology for Communication and Learning of Children with Autism: Application Design, Development and Evaluation Through Participatory Design Approach

Digital RMG Mapping in Bangladesh 2020

In Bangladesh, around 4 million garment workers are working in more than five thousand garment factories all around the country. Most of the factories are situated in Dhaka and Chittagong divisions in Bangladesh along with the membership of BGMEA and BKMEA. This study explores to understand garments workers' lifestyles briefly, through conducting qualitative interviews with n= 55 garment workers (32 workers were female and 23 workers were male) from 40 different garments in 6 different groups. We uncover the several areas of workers' life, which represent the scenarios of all garment workers. We identified the challenges and qualities of workers' daily life, and come up with a possible tool that might make their life easy and better.

Research in NSUHCI-DIAL Group

A Personalized Communication Application for Children with Autism through a Participatory Design Approach

Developing regions lack personalizable mobile applications with cultural context for CWA to aid in communication with parents and teachers. This led us to design and develop an application to address this underexplored area. Three participants (parents and teachers of CWA participated in two participatory design sessions to develop and improve the application. The same participants shared their views on the design and features of the application in the first study and provided feedback about them in the second study. There exists a literature gap on cultural context-based applications and a lack of personalization features for CWA. Our study aims to provide meaningful communication between CWA and others by developing a communication application that can be customized and personalized to cater to their needs. This work provides contextual design factors to HCI researchers by prototyping and developing a communication platform for CWA.

Meena Needs a Computer Now: Co-design Solutions to Barriers using Fictional Inquiry for Women in Computing

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 4 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.

Physician Well-being in Bangladesh: Burdens and Support Interventions During COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians in Bangladesh faced immense mental and physical burdens. Our research aimed to understand these challenges and propose a sustainable, adaptable intervention model.

Teens' Online Behavior in Bangladesh: Risks and Support Interventions

Online vulnerability among teenagers is a global concern, yet research often overlooks the unique cultural contexts of developing countries like Bangladesh. Our study investigates online risk behaviors and potential support mechanisms for a safe digital space for Bangladeshi teens

Assessment of the Driving Behavior and Stress in Multi-modal Road Culture in Developing Countries

Driver’s level of stress can impact the driving performance which in turn impacts the overall traffic situation. This is important when the traffic scenario is challenging in terms of having traffic congestion, unruly drivers and lack of law enforcement as present in Bangladesh. Real time capability in system to provide support during discomfort can be useful in scenarios which are traditionally neglected. Absence of concern about wellbeing among commercial vehicle drivers during stressful driving situations may lead to accidents and poor lifestyle. The availability of low-cost components has opened up opportunities in areas where resources are constrained. We look at the self-reported stress of drivers along with their personality category using quantitative (n=88) and qualitative user (n=26) study approaches. Once the stress level is confirmed, we have designed a low cost real time stress measurement system using Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and road conditions to support the drivers using low cost artifacts. The entire system is built up using a connectivity framework.

Development of Wearable Security for Women Against Sexual Harassment

We developed Jalli middleware to connect with a very low cost IoT device 'Protibaadi' where communication takes place using available network options within the scenario. It is able to use low range communication (e.g, Bluetooth), available cellular network based communication and if the internet is available, it takes advantage of connecting to the cloud to store IoT data for long term analytics. The strength of the system lies it its ability to act in real time. 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.

Cyber Security Concerns and Data Breach

Third party applications are the source of enjoyment through various trivia, games and utilities. Users are often unaware of the access they give to their applications. A simple application can access user’s personal information, placing users in vulnerable position, and resulting in a lot of negative experiences as well as security incidents. Experiences change the decision-making approaches which varies from person to person, and also between genders. Through closed group qualitative studies we are working for better experience among the users.

Teen-Parent Relationship in the Context of Bangladesh

Negative implications in the teen-parent relationship is a concern which has a profound impact on the relationship between them. Parents want to control the technology usage of teens for cyber abuse-related concerns, whereas teens try to hide their online activities from their parents. Misperception and behavioral difficulties are initiated in such circumstances between them. We found that there are distant relationships between teens and parents, and very often parental mediation influences it either negatively or positively.

Learning system for Autistic Children in the context of Developing Nations

A learning application designed for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is discussed here. In developing world context, the design process considers culturally adopted items in a basic learning application. Once the basic application was developed, close work with users explored the requirement for flexibility where parents can add items and voices that have emotional impact on children along with ability to connect to share what the a child is currently learning, as an effort to reduce distance between caregivers and special school educators. The work, titled DurontoShishu has been conducted in Bangladesh over a span of 1.5 years of time.

Ride-sharing Experiences in Bangladesh

Motorbike ridesharing service based on application in Bangladesh is independently popular and unique concept in ridesharing service among all over the world. In Bangladesh, Uber, Pathao, Shohoz, OBHAI etc. ridesharing companies are providing such service. Bangladesh first brought this concept in 2016. This motorbike ridesharing is the way of daily income for any unemployed, uneducated and low income people. Sometimes people are doing it as secondary job for extra income. However, this service helps to empower anyone and provide support to change the financial states of the low income people of Bangladesh. We explored among the motorbike drivers to know their economic growth, experience and the way of their empowerment. On the other hand, their raise a concern regarding ridesharing health and data privacy of the users. So are also exploring in all such possible dimensions.

Refugee (Rohingya) Health Problems in Bangladesh

Rohingya refugee community have faced various problems during their transition from Myanmar to Bangladesh. Around 1.7 million Rohingya people have migrated from Myanmar to Bangladesh in recent decade. A close study with this community along with corresponding doctors opened up challenges impacting the community in their physical health. There are also wounds from their experiences relating to mental conditions. It is clear that there must be a way to support the community for physical and mental wellbeing. We are working for technology solution that can support limited number of health workers towards wellbeing of this community.

Mini Nurse Healthcare Bot for Old Home

Modern days are not so comfortable for the elderly people compare to young people, because naturally they are passing a lonely day for a longer period of time. Elderly and physically weak people would like to lead an independent and quality life in their everyday lonely period, and some physical or mental support may help to improve their lifestyle. Healthcare is considered as an important issue all over the world, and developed countries always try to ensure better healthcare support to the civilians in different ways, whereas South Asian developing countries do not pay much attention to this aspect. There exist some multi-purpose robots for elderly people, but developing countries cannot afford this. From this perspective, to support their healthcare, we are thinking of similar kind of low cost solution. The development of a mini healthcare bot is able to assist the elderly people to take medicines as per to their schedule. This bot was initially built only for research purpose and now we can consider it as full functioning robot.

Bengali Bornomala (Alphabet) in Augmented Reality for Children

Bornomala AR is an Augmented Reality Application for Android devices which provides a better and easy way to learn Bengali alphabets. The name of the app is Bornomala AR where in Bengali, “Bornomala” means “alphabet”. This application is developed targeting the children of age 3 to 5 of Bangladesh, to make them more familiar with their mother language. From a qualitative research, the learning efficiency was measured with this application in Dhaka, Bangladesh. It has been found that, without the application, the average learning efficiency is 41.67% per week whereas with this application the learning efficiency becomes 58.33% per week with 17% improvement.

Social Justice and Digital Silence in the Context of Bangladesh

In August 2018, a student protest initiated in Bangladesh sought justice when two school students were run over by public bus. Student protesters were demonstrating on the street for days until they were physically attacked. Concurrent with the physical attacks, the country experienced a disconnect. Internet, restrictions on social media usage, and several high-profile arrests of people speaking about the incidents. These suppressive encounters created what we call a "digital silence." In response, we collected stories from people, which depict their effort to seek out information about the events unfolding and share their perspective of what happened. Through these in-the-moment stories, we see a glimpse of how the information suppression impacted people with varying proximity to the events, including protesters, bystanders, and family members. We also reflect on the benefit of the subtle defiance of storytelling for storytellers in the midst of this social justice effort.

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