PFI-TT: Novel mobile platform technology to both prevent and respond to teen dating violence

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The broader impact/commercial potential of this Partnerships for Innovation - Technology Translation (PFI-TT) PFI project is to develop a smartphone app/platform technology to prevent and respond to dating violence incidences, a significant public health problem affecting over 35% of high school students with long-term health, social and economic consequences. Despite the magnitude of this problem, 68% of high school principals reported lacking formal training on how to assist teen dating violence victims. The proposed technology offers an economically viable dating violence prevention strategy for high schools. The existing mobile apps are not designed for high school students to assist themselves (or a friend) who is a victim of teen dating violence and do not have a have a simple mechanism enabling high school administrators to coordinate and customize the prevention and response messaging their students are accessing. If successful, the proposed technology will fill a gap not addressed by currently available solutions, which are not designed to help the students enrolled in the 35,163 US high schools discretely extricate themselves from situations with the potential to become dangerous. The proposed project will consist of three elements that, combined, represent a highly innovative technology solution to a prevalent public health problem. First is the use of existing smartphone capabilities in new ways (e.g., enabling users to appear to receive urgent texts or phone calls, which are, in reality, simulated, to provide a socially sensitive reason for a student to leave a risky situation). Second is the application of extensive evidence-based research to both prevention and response technology features within the app. Third is a simple-to-use dashboard, through which high school administrators can easily customize data in the back-end database, to make it specific to their students and institution, and monitor its use among their students.The specific feature requirements needed for this interactive mobile platform will be informed by institutional review board (IRB)-reviewed interviews, focus groups and online surveys with students, parents/guardians and school administrators. The proposed hybrid smartphone app will run on Apple iOS and Android operating systems, using Google's Firebase SDK for analytics and accessing data from a back-end SQL database. The app platform will include a simple-to-use dashboard interface to the database, enabling schools to easily customize content to adapt to school and state policies and to monitor anonymous statistics about app use within their institution.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.