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

该项目汇集了来自多个学科的研究人员与社区合作伙伴，开发一系列新颖的传感、监测和消息传递技术，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合作，沿着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，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是一个研究基础设施，用于开发众包健康干预措施，其中社区成员撰写或根据文化定制干预规则和信息。VSN将使社区能够集体解决其确定为重要的健康相关问题，并提供预防和健康干预措施，这些干预措施利用通过智能手机应用程序或小组会议单独提供的支持和信息。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牧师联盟30个教会的20,000名成员产生直接影响。所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。 该SCC项目旨在开发一个研究基础设施，用于与社区合作伙伴合作共同设计和评估技术。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健康干预措施，其中社区成员撰写或根据文化定制干预规则和信息。这将包括开发方法，以确定外行可以有意义地对专家编写的干预对话进行修改的范围，并设计用户界面以实现这些修改。它还包括基于人工智能的社区创作的叙事文本索引的进展，以及时传递信息，以激励纵向，多行为干预的变化。还将开发自动生成行为改变的有说服力的论据方面的进展。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力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.