SBIR Phase I: Smartwatch-powered tag games for improving vaccination awareness

SBIR第一阶段项目将开展有吸引力和刺激性的教育活动，以提高疫苗接种意识和理解。科学证据表明，疫苗可有效预防流感等传染病，这是一种传染性呼吸道疾病。然而，尽管CDC建议普遍接种流感疫苗，但美国所有儿童中只有不到50%，非洲裔美国儿童中只有三分之一每年接种疫苗。拟议的活动旨在教育儿童和家长接种疫苗的好处，以增加接种疫苗的儿童人数。通过标签游戏和可穿戴设备，参与者模拟流感的传播，从而更好地可视化未接种疫苗的健康风险。长期目标是以有趣和令人兴奋的方式提高年轻学生的健康素养。教育儿童健康概念可以促进健康行为，并引导家庭做出更好的健康相关决定。提高健康素养，特别是在一个以技术为导向的社会中，是培养能够理解和使用新信息的繁荣人口的关键。拟议的SBIR项目的商业成果将导致一个适销对路的产品，将针对动手博物馆，并具有个人和社会效益。 该项目中的可扩展教育技术将以有趣和令人兴奋的方式让孩子们参与建模科学现象，同时帮助他们更好地理解这些现象。该系统使用智能手表来管理标签游戏，教育儿童接种流感疫苗的好处。每个参与者都被分配了一个健康状态，例如传染性，健康或免疫，然后跑来跑去模拟流感的传播。通过这些基于参与的活动，学生将更好地理解传染病传播，社区（群体）免疫和疾病爆发的基本概念。类似的活动可以用来教授其他科学现象，如化学反应和相变。该项目将利用从参与者那里获得反馈的系统调查来评价活动的有效性。这项工作填补了市场对教育技术工具的需求，这些工具提供了强大而难忘的学习体验，不仅提高了健康素养，还培养了学生对科学和数学的兴趣和信心。促进科学教育的使命。

This SBIR Phase I project will develop attractive and stimulating educational activities to improve vaccination awareness and understanding. Scientific evidence shows that vaccines are effective in preventing infectious diseases such as influenza, a contagious respiratory illness. However, despite CDC's recommendation for universal influenza vaccination, fewer than 50% of all children in the US, and only 1 in 3 of African-American children, are vaccinated each year. The proposed activities are designed to educate kids and parents about the benefits of vaccinations, in order to increase the number of vaccinated children. Through a tag game and wearable devices, participants simulate transmission of influenza, and thereby better visualize the health risks of going unvaccinated. The long-term goal is to improve the health literacy of young students in a fun and exciting way. Educating children about health concepts promotes healthy behaviors, and leads families toward better health-related decisions. Improving health literacy, especially in a technology-oriented society, is key to developing a thriving population that can understand and use new information. The commercial outcome of the proposed SBIR project will lead to a marketable product that will be targeted toward hands-on museums and has both individual and societal benefits. The scalable educational technology in this project will engage children in modeling scientific phenomena in a fun and exciting way, while at the same time help them to better understand such phenomena. The system uses smartwatches for managing tag games that educate children about the benefits of vaccination against influenza. Each participant is assigned a health status, such as infectious, healthy, or immune, and then runs around to simulate the spread of the flu. Through these participation-based activities, students will develop better understandings of the underlying concepts of infectious disease transmission, community-level (herd) immunity, and disease outbreaks. Similar activities can be used to teach other scientific phenomena such as chemical reactions and phase changes. The project will evaluate the effectiveness of activities using systematic surveys producing feedback from participants. This work fills a market need for educational technology tools that provide powerful and memorable learning experiences that not only improve health literacy but also foster student interest and confidence in science and math. Educating children by exposing them to the sciences, especially in health-related areas, is essential to improving wellbeing, and aligns with NSF?s mission of promoting science education.