CAREER: Health Bridge: Motivating Personal Health Record Adoption by Low -Income Communities

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The increase in obesity and related chronic illnesses has motivated academic, government, and commercial sectors to address this epidemic. Assistive technology interventions provide an inexpensive method to disseminate information, track health metrics, and give personalized feedback on outcomes for individuals. However the effectiveness of these interventions is limited for low-income communities because the interventions have been designed with little consideration for the social and environmental context of health-related behaviors. Personal Health Records (PHRs) can assist individuals receive personalized feedback and authoritative health information, but have not been widely adopted because of privacy, usability, and updating issues. The research objectives of this proposal are to discover how to integrate PHRs into everyday life and empower individuals to confidently secure their PHR data with privacy interfaces. The research is relies upon community-based, iterative, participatory design activities including contextual interviews, design workshops, shadowing, and iterative evaluation of prototypes to develop a integrative PHR framework called Health Bridge.The research supporting Health Bridge includes community building, curriculum design, and K-12 outreach activities. Research methodology and results will be integrated into the PI?s established health related course and specialized undergraduate curriculum in health related informatics. In addition, the PI and her students will help increase the pipeline of future informaticians by developing outreach materials that will be distributed by the National Center for Women & IT and the Computer Science Teachers Association Roadshow initiatives.