Increasing Health Equity Through In-The-Moment Reading Assistance for Adults with Diabetes Served at Community Health Centers

This SBIR Phase I project will fund the development and evaluate the feasibility and educational efficacy of a highly scalable service that provides adaptive grapheme-phoneme training for decoding English words embedded in digital text the adult learner is reading documents in a variety of environments: at workplace, at school, throughout daily life. GogyUp’s in-the-moment assistive reading technology to increase patients’ ability to understand, manage and communicate about a chronic disease and ultimately ensure greater health equity, a National Institute of Nursing Research strategic priority. SIGNIFICANCE: Type two diabetes mellitus (T2DM) affects over 30 million Americans and requires patients to competently manage their conditions at home. However, patient educational print materials for after-visit care are overly complicated, with excessively high reading difficulty and fall short in supporting functional readiness for self-management. Compounding this inaccessibility are several barriers that limit patients’ capacity to learn and build knowledge and health literacy (the ability to process health information to make health decisions), including low print literacy (18% of U.S. adults are unable to read basic sentences), and limited English proficiency. PROJECT: The team will engage in the NIH I-Corps program to explore and define strategies for commercialization.