SCC: Smart and Connected Churches for Promoting Health in Disadvantaged Populations

该项目将来自多个学科的研究人员与社区合作伙伴聚集在一起，开发一系列新颖的传感、监测和信息传递技术，为服务不足的城市社区的社区成员创建虚拟安全网（VSN）系统。在这项工作中，研究人员将与黑人部长联盟的成员和成员教会的卫生部领导人，以及提供健康促进外展的志愿者，教会领导和附属于医院的社区联络员合作，以改善这个以非洲裔美国人为主的社区的整体健康状况。VSN是开发众包卫生干预措施的研究基础设施，由社区成员编写或根据文化定制干预规则和信息。VSN将使社区能够共同解决其认为重要的健康相关问题，并提供预防和健康干预措施，利用支持和通过智能手机应用程序或在小组会议期间单独传递的信息。VSN还将用于帮助社区确定和解决健康的社会决定因素，包括粮食不安全、无家可归和卫生知识普及。这项研究将对波士顿黑人部长联盟30个教会的20,000名成员产生直接影响。实施的技术可以迅速传播到美国的其他教会社区，企业和社会组织。这个SCC项目旨在开发一个研究基础设施，用于与社区伙伴合作设计和评估技术。该项目将利用波士顿地区已经存在的深厚的社会支持网络。在这一努力中开发的关键技术包括众包卫生干预措施，由社区成员编写或根据文化定制干预规则和信息。这将包括开发方法，以确定外行人可以对专家撰写的干预对话进行有意义的修改范围，并设计用户界面以实现这些修改。它还包括在基于人工智能的社区撰写的叙事文本索引方面取得的进展，用于即时消息传递，以激励纵向、多行为干预的变化。在为行为改变自动生成有说服力的论据方面也将取得进展。基于对话的界面将生成可解释的人工智能学习模型，使社区成员能够理解并潜在地修改这些模型的工作方式。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project brings together researchers from several disciplines with community partners to develop a range of novel sensing, monitoring, and messaging technologies to create a Virtual Safety Net (VSN) system for community members in an underserved urban community. In this effort, researchers will collaborate with members of the Black Ministerial Alliance and Health Ministry leaders of member churches, along with volunteers who provide health promotion outreach, the church leadership and a community liaison affiliated with a hospital to improve the overall health of this predominately African American community. The VSN is a research infrastructure for development of crowdsourced health interventions, in which community members author or culturally tailor intervention rules and messages. The VSN will empower the community to collectively solve health-relevant problems it identifies as important and provide preventive and health interventions that leverage support and messaging delivered individually via smartphone apps or during group meetings. The VSN will also be used to help the community identify and address social determinants of health, including food insecurity, homelessness, and health literacy. This research will have immediate impact for the 20,000 members of the 30 churches in the Black Ministerial Alliance of Boston. The technologies implemented can be rapidly disseminated to other church communities, businesses and social organizations in the US. This SCC project aims to develop a research infrastructure that will be used to co-design and evaluate technologies in collaboration with community partners. The project will leverage the deep social support networks already existing in the Boston area. Key technologies developed in this effort include crowdsourced health interventions, in which community members author or culturally tailor intervention rules and messages. This will include developing methods to identify the range of modifications that laypersons can meaningfully make to expert-authored intervention dialogue and designing user interfaces to enable these modifications. It also includes advances in artificial intelligence-based indexing of community-authored narrative text for just-in-time messaging to motivate change in longitudinal, multi-behavior interventions. Advances in the automated generation of persuasive arguments for behavior change will also be developed. Dialogue-based interfaces to generate explainable artificial intelligence-learned models will be made to enable community members to understand and potentially modify how these models work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.