UNITE: Smart, Connected, and Coordinated Maternal Care for Underserved Communities

This project presents UNITE (UNderserved communITiEs): a community engagement model that is smart, deploying ubiquitous monitoring and lifelogging; connected, bringing together a diverse cast of community members including mothers, families, care providers, and outreach resources; and coordinated, using technology to proactively reach out to the community and use personalized intervention and education for improved self-management by the women. The UNITE project champions a model that is scalable in size, portable across different ethnic communities, and promises improved outcomes through better self-management and community enhanced motivational factors. The UNITE project will perform a controlled study using a community of underserved Orange County mothers together with non-profit agencies, hospitals, and local support organizations to evaluate the efficacy of this new community-enhanced self-management approach, and its impact on community building. The project will build larger communities of healthcare providers, insurance providers, and governmental agencies that can work in concert to enhance the well-being and lifestyles of mothers and families across a diverse spectrum of socio-economically disadvantaged groups. The UNITE project will also train the next generation of healthcare providers to deploy socio-economically relevant Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology in a cost-effective and user-friendly manner.

The UNITE project will exploit wearable IoT devices, lifelogging, context recognition, and health monitoring to build holistic digital phenotypes of the maternal care community using multi-modal data capture via two technical thrusts. The first technical thrust will develop a community-enhanced personalized monitoring and recommendation system. The system will leverage advanced signal processing and stochastic control techniques coupled with recent advances in matrix completion and graph signal processing to close the loop between observations, data processing and model building. By exploiting the additional dimension provided by the community surrounding the individual mothers, the project will design smart mining algorithms for cause assessment through personalized models in the context of the larger community. The second technical thrust will enable self-management via a Registered Nurse (RN)-in-the-loop smart monitoring-intervention system that will continuously monitor maternal-related physiological signs as well as behavioral information and social lifestyle of mothers using a wearable IoT-based body area network, offering personalized feedback (e.g., notification, warning, recommendation) on the mother's physical and mental health status as well as detailed data for health professionals. The self-management in the second thrust will be improved and incentivized through the first thrust's personalized community-enhanced recommendation system, and will result in technology-enhanced community care coordination and education. Through these technical thrusts, the UNITE system will exploit ubiquitous monitoring and develop a recommendation system capable of dynamically supporting a healthy lifestyle of a mother during pregnancy. The leading design principle is that the community surrounding the individual mother enhances monitoring and interventions, enabling more personalized recommendations that motivate better self-management.