Fatima: a digital platform to transform qualitative reasearch in marginalised sectors

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Qualitative research will underpin effective commercial activities, NGO interventions and government policies to address the direct impacts of COVID-19, and more generally for the UK's wider socio-economic recovery.However, whilst the elderly, socio-economically disadvantaged and less-integrated ethnic demographics are impacted most, COVID-19 has further increased the already unmet challenge of qualitative research within these marginalised and often vulnerable groups.With the most effective face-to-face data gathering - including interviews, focus groups and field work - prevented by social distancing and travel restrictions, remotely undertaking qualitative research within these groups faces fundamental barriers to accessibility and scale due to:* Poor access to broadband, computers and smartphones compatible with most connectivity platforms, and overall low rates of digital literacy* Lack of technology to manage data gathering from respondents who can only be reached via landline or 'non-Smart' mobile feature phones, and integrating effective research workflows across multiple platforms* Study design and agility to extract the complex and sensitive multi-dimensional sentiment data, given these respondents' specific scenarios -- many targets for researchers in these marginalised and vulnerable groups may also have compromised capacity to articulate direct responses for reasons of safeguarding or otherwise* Scalability of costly manually-intensive analysis methodologies to clearly identify and correlate these dependencies across more complex topic models and other hidden qualitative data variablesDespite an increased need for actionable outputs, this work has therefore largely been suspended, both by commercially-active and vertically-integrated research organisations.Existing digital toolsets for qualitative data gathering are consumer-focussed web/smartphone-based applications, which are predominantly designed to meet the needs of large-scale corporate market researchers. These commonly use automated speech-to-text transcription, but support only very low-level sentiment analysis for simple tightly-constrained research scenarios.In response, Maido are developing Fatima, a digital platform for qualitative data collection and analysis, which uniquely connects the end-to-end research value chain for marginalised respondents who can only be accessed via feature phone conversations.Maido have already completed a successful proof-of-concept development, realising the core data architecture and remote workflows for recorded data gathering. Leveraging their minimum-viable-product and proven transcription and natural language processing toolsets, Maido now seek to fully develop the qualitative features and programmatic functionality into a scaled full-platform prototype, with a high level of analytical automation.