Smart and Connected Churches for Promoting Health in Disadvantaged Populations

Lead PI

• Timothy W. Bickmore

Co PI

• Michael K. Paasche-Orlow, Boston University

Abstract

This project focuses on development of technologies to improve population health for an underserved urban community in Boston. We are working with communities in a network of 12 churches in the Boston area, along with volunteers who provide health promotion outreach (“Health Ministry”), the church leadership, and a community liaison affiliated with a hospital, to improve the overall health of this predominately African American community. African Americans struggle significantly more with many health behaviors (e.g., smoking, physical activity) and have significantly higher rates of many chronic health conditions (e.g., diabetes, hypertension), compared to other racial and ethnic groups. In this effort, we are collaborating with members of the Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston and Health Ministry leaders of member churches to develop a range of sensing, monitoring, and messaging technologies to provide a smartphone-based conversational agent system that can improve health for community members. The system will empower this community of individuals to collectively solve health-relevant problems it identifies as important, such as exercise and diet promotion.

Funding

NSF

Related Publications

• E. Stowell, T.K. O’Leary, E. Kimani, M.K. Paasche-Orlow, T.W. Bickmore, A.G. Parker. “Investigating Opportunities for Crowdsourcing in Church-Based Health Interventions: A Participatory Design Study.” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3313831.3376833
• S. Olafsson, D. Parmar, E. Kimani, T.K. O’Leary, T.W. Bickmore. “‘More like a person than reading text in a machine’: Characterizing User Choice of Embodied Agents vs. Conventional GUIs on Smartphones.” CHI EA ’21: Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021. DOI: 10.1145/3411763.3451664
• T.K. O’Leary, E. Stowell, J. Hoffman, M.K. Paasche-Orlow, T.W. Bickmore, A.G. Parker. “Examining the Intersections of Race, Religion & Community Technologies: A Photovoice Study.” ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI 2021), 2021. DOI: 10.1145/3411764.3445418
• T.K. O’Leary, E. Stowell, E. Kimani, D. Parmar, S. Olafsson, J. Hoffman, A.G. Parker, M.K. Paasche-Orlow,  T.W. Bickmore. “Community-Based Cultural Tailoring of Virtual Agents.” IVA ’20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents, 2020. DOI: 10.1145/3383652.3423875