Food-Availability SMS System for US Homeless Communities

We present the design and preliminary evaluation of a mobile text-based system and that provides homeless people in the United States with information about the availability of free meals. The system, piloted in Ann Arbor, Michigan, provides information about when and where free meals are offered based on zipcode as entered by users. It has features to address issues around information access, incompleteness, and irrelevance. We found that SMS text messages are preferred by our homeless users even when they are non-literate and own smartphones, and that formal systems are useful even in contexts where word-of-mouth predominates.