Health Media Lab

The goal of this research was to develop and evaluate a Spanish language telephone helpline staffed by bi-lingual nurses, to assist Hispanic people make knowledgeable, skill-based health and medical care decisions. The helpline was directly linked to educational vignettes broadcast on Spanish language radio. The radio program and helpline provided four main services to listeners and callers: 1) advice on routine medical concerns; 2) guidance and behavioral suggestions on chronic disease prevention; 3) information about cancer screening and treatment; and 4) references to local Spanish-speaking health care services. We broadcast one year's worth of five-minute educational radio programs three times each weekday on Spanish language radio in the greater Washington-Baltimore and San Francisco-Oakland metropolitan areas. Nurses staffed the helpline telephones on week nights, and data were collected from each call ( n = 1,569). Main findings are that Hispanic people: 1) do listen to health messages on the radio, and 2) will call a health professional for information.

An agent's embodiment within a virtual environment refers to its representation, and defines its capabilities, within the environment. This paper presents a system for the strong integration of embodiment with the agent's deliberative mechanism. This mechanism is based upon the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) paradigm, and allows the agent to deliberate directly upon the location and animation of its embodiment. This fusion then provides the agent with the ability to freely mutate its embodied form to best suit the task at hand. At the same time, care must be taken to preserve the agents' sense of self, so that users have a clear idea of who their agent is regardless of the embodiment that it has adopted. This paper outlines the system designed and developed to achieve this. This work forms part of the Agent Chameleons project, which aims to create agents that are free to migrate, mutate and evolve within and between various di#erent environments and platforms.

Health Media Lab, an R & D firm, and The Alzheimer's Association, a large voluntary organization, are collaborating to create an online course to train supervisory nurses in dementia care staff supervision. This paper discusses this collaboration as an example of how researchers and service organizations can work toward mutually beneficial goals: the creation and evaluation of innovative educational materials, as well as their dissemination from laboratory to field use.