Precision HIV Health App, Positive Peers, Powered by Data Harnessing, AI, and Learning (Clinical Collaborators: Dr. Ann Avery from MetroHealth and Dr. Rebecca Schnall at Columbia University)

Mobile phone applications provide a new and easy-access platform for delivering tailored human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and sexually transmitted disease prevention and care. Recent researches have shown that mobile interventions have positive effects in adhesive to care program and antiretroviral therapy, self-management of disease, and is also critical in decreasing the HIV pandemic, and stigmatization. Partnering with the MetroHealth clinical researchers, we apply an innovative intervention approach combined with Artificial Intelligence to help the targeted youth to engage more with the developed HIV health app and facilitate the flow of information that has a critical role in decreasing the uncertainty of patients by being injected to useful related information. Natural language processing (NLP) is used for improving the interaction of users of an intervention app and increase the motivation for using the app while providing a compact platform for users to better find the answers to their questions and concerns.

The innovation is a precision health App, Positive Peers (PP), powered by data harnessing, AI, and learning, designed by CWRU-MetroHealth Hospital collaboration. PP is an Android/iOS-based social media app targeting young HIV adults between 13 to 34 years old. In this project, we try to make PP interactive while decreasing the working load of the clinician involving lively in the app for people who cannot seek help via face-to-face intervention programs. We are using Natural Language Processing-based (NLP) AI technologies to link the Internet contents and applications and provide a rich source of information and experiences for every inquiry. The NLP system works as an automatic recommender/question-answering system and recommends three of the most related blog posts of the PP database to their inquiries. The AI system also evaluates what topics motivate users and monitor common concerns. By integrating with the state-of-the-art telehealth and remote monitoring technologies, our solution can improve accessibility, extend to address health disparities, and utilize innovative technologies to increase reach for the HIV population.

Publications: [J24, C30], More information can be found at https://positivepeers.org/