Churches play a major role in providing social support to address health inequities within various communities in the United States, in part by connecting church members to services. While public health has a history of disseminating interventions in faith communities, little work has explored how technologies can be used to tailor interventions to the unique culture of each church community. Following Community Based Participatory Research principles, we partnered with predominantly Black churches to develop and evaluate an mHealth intervention. This intervention addresses a variety of topics, including COVID-19 vaccine promotion.
This work is funded by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health.
People
- Andrea Parker (Principal Investigator, Georgia Tech)
- Timothy Bickmore (Principal Investigator, Northeastern University)
- Michael Paasche-Orlow (Principal Investigator, Northeastern University)
- Jessica A Hoffman (Co-Investigator, Northeastern University)
- Stephen Intille (Co-Investigator, Northeastern University)
- Elizabeth Stowell (PhD Student, Northeastern University)
- Teresa K. O’Leary (PhD Student, Northeastern University)
- Darley Sackitey (PhD Student, Georgia Tech)
Partner Organizations
- Black Ministerial Alliance Ten Point (BMATP)
- Relational Agents Group, Northeastern University
- mHealth Research Group, Northeastern University
- Boston Medical Center
Publications
- Teresa K. O’Leary, Elizabeth Stowell, Jessica A Hoffman, Michael Paasche-Orlow, Timothy Bickmore, Andrea G Parker. 2021. Examining the Intersections of Race, Religion & Community Technologies: A Pho-tovoice Study. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2021).
- Teresa K. O’Leary, Elizabeth Stowell, Everlyne Kimani, Dhaval Parmar, Stefan Olafsson, Jessica Hoffman, Andrea G Parker, Michael K Paasche-Orlow, Timothy Bickmore. Community-Based Cultural Tailoring of Virtual Agents. In Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA2020).
- Elizabeth Stowell, Teresa K. O’Leary, Everlyne Kimani, Michael K. Paasche-Orlow, Timothy Bickmore, Andrea G. Parker. Investigating Opportunities for Crowdsourcing in Church-Based Health Interventions: A Participatory Design Study. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in ComputingSystems (CHI 2020). [Honorable Mention Award at CHI 2020].