UNITE Project

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

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.

UNITE Community Advisory Board

Community Organizations:

  1. Pamela Pimentel, CEO, MOMS Orange County;
    UNITE Chief Community Advisory Officer (C2AO)
  2. Dr. Julianne Toohey, Clinical Professor, Obstetrics & Gynecology, UCI School of Medicine
  3. Katie Skelton, St. Joseph’s Hospital of Orange
  4. Kimberly Goll, Children & Families Commission of Orange County
  5. Georgia Maldonado, Community Health Initiative of Orange County

UCI:

  1. Priscilla Kehoe, Director, Research Scholarship, Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing
  2. Julie Rousseau, Associate Clinical Professor of Nursing & Certified Nurse Midwife

International Advisors:

  1. Dr. Anna Axelin, Associate Professor of Nursing, University of Turku, Finland
  2. Professor Pasi Liljeberg, Embedded Systems and IoT, University of Turku, Finland