Health, Medical, and Bio-Informatics

Collecting and analyzing biological, medical, and health information

Researchers Working in this Area

Related Research Projects

Assessing the Impact of Media Polarization on Public Health Emergencies

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$10,000.00
Funding agency
Cline Center for Advanced Social Research

Media plays a big role in how citizens evaluate public health emergencies. This project seeks to understand how public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis are reported. In order to assess the polarization and politicization of U.S. news coverage, we are comparing news by political leaning (left, center, right) as segmented by AllSides media bias ratings. We…

newspaper words

Augmenting Health Self-Regulation across the Cancer Survivorship Continuum by Digital Phenotyping

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$30,000.00
Funding agency
Campus Research Board

Breast cancer (BC) is a chronic illness. BC survivors often deal with the lifelong needs of self-management, such as controlling the symptoms, taking diet or nutrition plans, or adopting a physical activity program across their cancer survivorship continuum. Our team is eager to develop a novel technique to predict the intentions of lifestyle behavior by tracking ones' information behavior and…

head with questions

Building a Motivational-Interviewing Conversational Agent (MintBot) for Promoting COVID-19 Vaccination among People with Multiple Sclerosis

Time frame
2021-2022
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$74,992.00
Funding agency
Jump ARCHES

Individuals with multiple sclerosis are likely to be hesitant to get the COVID-19 vaccine due to their compromised health condition. This project aims to develop an accessible, generalizable and efficient digital health solution for promoting COVID-19 vaccination among vulnerable populations, such as people with disabilities.

MintBot

CAREER: Using Network Analysis to Assess Confidence in Research Synthesis

Time frame
2021-Present
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$599,963.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

Policy in areas such as conservation, energy, healthcare, and sustainable development is informed by a variety of factors, including the best available science. Determining the best available science requires synthesizing multiple scientific results to gauge both the level of scientific consensus and the reliability of the research. However, on some policy-relevant topics, syntheses continue…

network of dots

Collaborative Research: Accelerating Synthetic Biology Discovery & Exploration through Knowledge Integration

Time frame
2019-Present
Investigator
J. Stephen Downie
Total funding to date
$211,699.00
Funding agency
National Science Foundation

The scientific challenge for this project is to accelerate discovery and exploration of the synthetic biology design space. In particular, many parts used in synthetic biology come from or are initially tested in a simple bacteria, E. coli, but many potential applications in energy, agriculture, materials, and health require either different bacteria or higher level organisms (yeast for…

synthetic biology

Developing Tools for Implementation of Illinois Project for Local Assessment of Needs (IPLAN) for Local Health Departments

Time frame
2017-2019
Investigator
Ian Brooks
Total funding to date
$75,000.00
Funding agency
Illinois Department of Health

This project works with the Illinois Department of Public Health to develop an information system that will enable local health departments and other stakeholders in Illinois to use and analyze data currently being disseminated by IDPH. This data will be used to develop health indicators, such as maternal and infant health, non-communicable diseases, drug overdoses, healthcare access, and…

IDPH Web Portal

Development of a Chatbot for Delivering Long-Term Motivational Interviewing for Improving Exercise Adherence in Hemodialysis Patients

Time frame
2022-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$75,000.00
Funding agency
Jump ARCHES

There are approximately 600,000 individuals in the U.S. with kidney failure undergoing maintenance hemodialysis (HD) therapy. HD patients have several co-morbidities, including muscle wasting, cardiovascular disease, and bone disorders, with very high medical costs, averaging ~ $93,000/patient/year. Lifestyle interventions such as exercise and nutritional modification are often prescribed to…

medical chatbot

Evaluation of Medical Information Indexing Systems

Time frame
2013-2013
Investigator
Jana Diesner
Total funding to date
$38,900.00
Funding agency
Intelligent Medical Objects


How accurate and suitable are current solutions? How can they be improved? We evaluate the coverage and accuracy of various medical terminologies, and test strategies for increasing the precision of mapping medical reports to standardized terminologies. 

Identifying False HPV-Vaccine Information and Modeling Its Impact on Risk Perceptions

Time frame
2020-Present
Investigator
Jessie Chin
Total funding to date
$389,810.00
Funding agency
National Institutes of Health

Human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S., with over 34,000 new HPV-related cancers diagnosed annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. An HPV vaccine, which was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2006, is recommended as part of routine vaccinations for school-aged children. However, the vaccine's…

network

Identifying Potential Bias in Science Using Citation Network Structures

Time frame
2020-2022
Investigator
Jodi Schneider
Total funding to date
$29,960.00
Funding agency
Campus Research Board

Biased citation benefits authors in the short-term by bolstering grants and papers, making them more easily accepted. However, it can have severe negative consequences for scientific inquiry. The need for a bias detection tool is evident from previous studies on citation bias, but existing work lacks crucial elements needed to scale the underlying approaches. This project will test the…

abstract science concept

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