June 25, 2020
Initiative co-funds two Innovation Gap Fund grants with CoMotion
The Population Health Initiative and CoMotion have announced Population Health Innovation Gap Fund grants of $50,000 each to teams led by , a senior research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering, and , a research scientist in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences.
These joint awards are intended to fund projects that simultaneously support the 91探花鈥檚 vision for improving population health while also fulfilling the CoMotion Innovation Gap Fund鈥檚 goal of enabling research that will achieve sustainable economic or societal impact.
Bj枚rling鈥檚 work addresses the important issue of teen mental health. As stress increases for adolescents, school resources for mental health are unable to stem the steady rise in depression that has been observed in young people. Bj枚rling and her team have spent the past four years working with teens in school to co-design EMAR, a social robot (pictured above), to address adolescent stress and provide a micro-mental health intervention. This grant will enable the team to build a robust, high-fidelity prototype of their existing robot, and deploy five EMAR robots in schools for pilot testing.
Galvin鈥檚 project is to further develop the PestiSeguro/PestiSafe app, which delivers critical pesticide safety information to farmworkers in their primary language, Spanish. Typically, pesticide safety instructions are available only in English, despite 77% of U.S. farmworkers using Spanish as their main language. The app has been successfully tested with tree fruit farmers in Washington, and this grant will expand the use of the app to most Washington crops by scaling up the database of pesticide products from 100 to 2,000.