Theme: Adolescent Health
Challenge:Design an app to solve the challenge of providing honest, real-time, private data from youth and young adults about “unmentionable” high-risk activities, like sexual behavior, substance use, sadness, and relationship drama to researchers and program experts who work with youth.
Background: The health field has been trying to prevent the most common adolescent and young adult health problems since time began: sexually transmitted diseases, depression, substance abuse and dating violence. By the age of 25, more than 90% of young adults will have experienced more than one of these problems, and for some youth, the consequences will be lifelong (infertility, homelessness, brain injuries, etc.).
It’s almost impossible to know what works in terms of prevention efforts, as health researchers rely on survey answers given by youth after the fact with questions such as: How many times did you use a condom for sex in the last six months? Now, really, who remembers?
We want to put the best and brightest minds in tech behind the solution. We want an app where young people are enticed and excited to share their Unmentionable data – data about the whos, whats, wheres and whens of their risk behaviors - in the moment or soon after.
For this app, we want to get honest, real-time, private data from youth and young adults, with these three key factors in place:
•Find patterns in the activities and emotions shared
•Continued, consistent user input through incentives
•Share open source data to create programs and services that prevent long term consequences from adolescent “mistakes”
The national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) monitors six categories of priority health-risk behaviors among youth and young adults, including behaviors that contribute to unintentional injuries and violence; tobacco use; alcohol and other drug use; sexual behaviors; unhealthy dietary behaviors; and physical inactivity. Here’s some data from the most recent national survey:
Nationally, teen pregnancy rates are greater in Hispanic populations than all others
Chlamydia is 9x higher for African American young women than Caucasian women.
More than half of youth aged 15-24 who are infected with HIV are African-American.
24% of students had had five or more drinks of alcohol in a row (i.e., within a couple of hours) on at least 1 day in the past month.
28% of high school students rode in a car or other vehicle driven by someone who had been drinking alcohol one or more times during the past 30 days.
31% of students had been in a physical fight one or more times during the 12 months before the survey.
20% of students had been bullied on school property during the 12 months before the survey.
12% of students had ever sniffed glue, breathed the contents of aerosol spray cans, or inhaled any paints or sprays to get high one or more times during their life.
12% of students were obese3 and 15.8% of students were overweight.
11% of students went without eating for 24 or more hours to lose weight or to keep from gaining weight during the 30 days before the survey.
Youth need to be engaged and motivated to put in their own data on a regular basis.
Users need to be assured of the privacy of their personal information.
It has to be designed interactively with a youth audience in mind.
We don't know of any other similiar projects.
Data set to work with:
http://www.healthstatus2020.com/owh/index.html
ISIS has a track record of bringing tech products to mass markets. Our most recent app prevent dating abuse and sexual assault on college campuses won a White House / Health and Human Services Challenge award and has had 30,000 downloads in the first month. http://www.circleof6app.com/
Other projects include SexINFO, the first ever SMS texting service for youth in 2006.
InSPOT - ecards for sexually transmitted disease partner notifications (based on evites)
We reach over half a million youth with our projects and services each year.