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Mobile Speech Recognizer
Persuasive Health Information
Mobile Language Learning

Berkeley Institute of Design

Persuasive Health Information

A necessary precedent to providing sufficient healthcare in developing regions is providing access to appropriate healthcare information. Community health workers often lack the skill and training necessary to perform essential healthcare practices. Even in cases where training initiatives are in place, health workers often lack the confidence and motivation necessary to put their training into practice. Thus, it is not just a matter of providing access to healthcare information, but one of providing information in a way that encourages and promotes changes toward more healthy behavior.

Hesperian Foundation , a non-profit publisher of community health books that has been tackling this problem for over thirty years, compiles health materials in over 80 languages that are accessible and empowering to people with little formal education. We are currently working with Hesperian to further extend their reach through technology by (1) enabling timely and widespread information access through prevalent mobile technologies and (2) conveying their existing materials in innovative, speech-based methods. We utilize the potential of speech interfaces for targeting semi-literate or illiterate users, as well as for effectively conveying persuasive information. We have found that interactive speech-based interfaces that engage users in dialogue are more persuasive than interfaces which simply play recorded messages. We hope that by combining the use of the smartphone speech recognizer with existing materials from Hesperian, we can extend the reach of healthcare information to more health workers and empower them with the confidence and motivation to utilize it.

This project is in its early stages - please do contact us if you have feedback or ideas for collaboration!

Divya Ramachandran
divya At eecs.berkeley.edu

Matthew Kam
mattkam At eecs.berkeley.edu

John Canny
jfc At eecs.berkeley.edu