HCC: Small: First Days: Improving Maternal and Infant Health with Persuasive Technology

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This proposal focuses on the development of motive and persuasive technologies (MPT) for personal health and health decision making. In particular persuasive technologies could help influence mothers to make better health choices. Motive technologies can improve community health worker job performance. MPT is a relatively new area and much foundational work remains to be done. This project draws on classical theories of persuasion from psychology, economics, rhetoric, and the recent literature on persuasive technologies to inform the approach. The nascent MPT literature has shown that many classical influence mechanisms ?work? via information and communication technology. But relatively little work has compared the relative power of these mechanisms, which is important for MPT to grow as a design science. And very little work has been done on persuasion in developing regions where MPT has great potential impact - the diffusion of innovation literature has shown that personal choice is the main challenge to development in many poor communities. The goal of this project is to compare the relative power of different persuasive mechanisms in the context of maternal and infant health care.The results of this work will have profound impacts on underserved communities in the US. For example, recent work by the PI on language learning among immigrant farm workers in the US suggests that they face many of the challenges that the poor in developing regions face. There are estimated to be 13 million such workers in the US. Poor education, lack of trust and participation in the formal health system, conflicts with traditional practices, all reproduce the challenges seen in health care in developing regions. Maternal and infant health are among the most basic indicators of social development. They comprise two of the eight Millennium Development Goals defined by the United Nations. The research will shed light on the challenges in delivering maternal and infant health care to poor communities, and on finding practical means to overcome them. Success in the project would pave the way to widespread use of MPT in health care, and will inform its application to other areas such as agriculture, education, and sustainable development.