Abstract
Mental health care access remains deeply unequal even in systems undergoing rapid reform. In Saudi Arabia, significant public investment, digital health expansion, and a generational shift in attitudes have created meaningful progress, yet treatment-seeking rates remain low among low-income families, migrant workers, and residents of underserved regions. Understanding why this gap persists even as services expand requires moving beyond supply-side explanations and attending to the social conditions under which people decide whether it is safe and worthwhile to seek care at all. The broader research question animating both my technical and STS work is how systems, technological and institutional, can be designed to reach the populations they most intend to serve, and what it means for a system to be trusted, fair, and genuinely accessible rather than merely available.
My Capstone project, CavPool, is a Flutter-based ride-sharing application built exclusively for UVA students, developed with a team of four engineers over the Fall 2025 semester. The app addresses a concrete access problem: UVA students without personal vehicles frequently struggle to reach off-Grounds destinations such as airports, major cities, and sporting events. CavPool solves this by connecting student drivers and riders through a mobile platform built on Firebase Authentication, Firestore, and Firebase Storage, with Google Maps, Places, and Geolocator APIs powering real-time route planning and location-based ride matching. The core user flow allows drivers to post ride offers with pickup and dropoff destinations and times, while riders can browse matching offers, request to join, and wait for driver acceptance. A continuous integration and delivery pipeline via GitHub Actions kept the codebase deployable across both iOS and Android throughout development. The project required navigating a fundamental sociotechnical challenge: building a system trusted enough for strangers to share a car, which demanded careful attention to identity verification through UVA-affiliated accounts, transparent ride matching logic, and a user experience that made the stakes of each interaction feel legible and safe.
My STS research paper examines mental health care access for low-income and marginalized populations in Saudi Arabia, analyzing the structural progress, remaining gaps, and conditions required for equitable care under the Vision 2030 reform agenda. Drawing on four analytical concepts from the science and technology studies literature, trust, fairness, voice, and stigma, the paper argues that expanding the supply of services is necessary but insufficient: reforms reach vulnerable populations only when they also address the social conditions that shape whether people seek care. The paper evaluates three interlocking policy priorities, extending meaningful health insurance coverage, deepening community-based infrastructure in underserved regions, and consolidating labor and legal reforms, through case studies of low-income Saudi families and migrant workers in the Eastern Province. It concludes that Saudi Arabia's most successful reforms already reflect sociotechnical thinking, and that applying the same logic to language accessibility, community voice mechanisms, and inclusive insurance design is the natural and necessary next step.
