Fall 2021 Alumni Magazine Digital Copy

“APPS OFFER A UNIQUELY ACCESSIBLE,
SCALABLE, AND UNTAPPED SOLUTION
FOR GIVING PARENTS ACCESS TO HIGH-
QUALITY, ACTIONABLE HEALTH
INFORMATION ABOUT THEIR SICK CHILD"
I moved to Edmonton to start my doctorate at the U of A in
Psychiatry (graduating in 2019), where I worked on using
machine learning in personalized and precision medicine to
predict whether or not a patient’s depression would be
improved by treatment.
Can you explain more in-depth what your mobile health
app for parents entails?
This project — designed by Drs. Shannon Scott and Lisa
Hartling after five years of collaboration through their CIHR
Foundation Grant and funding through their Stollery
Science Lab Distinguished Researcher Awards — entails
making the first mobile health app for parents using
Canadian-relevant research about children’s acute illness.
To use the app, parents will verbally tell the app their
child’s symptoms (barky cough, runny nose, crying, etc.),
and this description will be matched to the correct health
resource using speech recognition. Health information will
be presented as a set of health resources (e.g. videos,
infographics) in the app.
These are based on best-available research evidence,
co-developed with Canadian parents and healthcare
professionals to ensure they resonate with parents.
Data from this app will help us build a picture of how
parents find and act on health information in apps,
and how parental identity (e.g. gender, race, and age)
influences app use and health decisions. These
insights will let us iteratively improve our app as we
gather more data.
How did you become involved in this
interdisciplinary project?
In a funny turn of events, Drs. Scott and Hartling
contacted me after reading a profile of my work from
a previous postdoctoral position on the Department
of Pediatrics website. They were interested in
improving health information access by integrating a
machine learning approach with their work in
pediatric knowledge translation and evidence
synthesis. I thought their idea was a prudent, highly
novel application of AI that addressed a very
frustrating aspect of family healthcare for many
parents: accessing reliable pediatric health
information on-demand. We began discussing how a
project like this would look, and ended up agreeing
that a postdoctoral fellowship would be the best way
to work together developing these tools.
Stollery Science
Lab Distinguished
Researchers Drs.
Lisa Hartling (L) &
Shannon Scott(R)
Photo: WCHRI
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