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

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.