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

Workshop and Community Advisory Board Meeting

Feb 11-15, 2019

 MOMS Orange County, Santa Anna, CA, USA

UNITE (UNderserved communITiEs) presents 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 performs 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 builds 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 also trains the next generation of healthcare providers to deploy socio-economically relevant Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology in a cost-effective and user-friendly manner. This workshop is partially funded through the National Science Foundation grant CNS-1831918 within the NSF Smart and Connected Communities (S&CC) program.

The UNITE Workshop and Advisory Board Meeting Participants:
  • Pamela Pimentel, MOMS Orange County, CA, USA
  • Nikil Dutt, School of Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Marco Levorato, School of Information and Computer Science, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Yuqing Guo, School of Nursing, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Margaret Schneider, School of Social Ecology, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Stephanie Reich, School of Education, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Amir M. Rahmani, TU Wien, Austria and UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Pasi Liljeberg, Department of Future Technologies, University of Turku, Finland
  • Anna Axelin, Department of Nursing, University of Turku, Finland
  • Julianne Toohey, UCI Medical Center, CA, USA
  • Catherine Skelton, St. Joseph Hospital, Orange, CA, USA
  • Kimberly Goll, Children & Families Commission of Orange County, CA, USA
  • Georgina Maldonado, Community Health Initiative of Orange County, CA, USA
  • Priscilla Kehoe, School of Nursing, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Julie Rousseau, School of Nursing, UC Irvine, CA, USA
  • Cheryl Meronk, CalOptima, CA, USA
  • Phillip Tsunoda, CalOptima, CA, USA

Funded by NSF’s Smart and Connected Communities programme