An interactive tool to help you take a behaviourally informed approach when designing your communications

The theme of the 2023 annual virtual CHASM conference is “Health is Social: Leveraging the Metaverse to Improve Public Health.” A theme throughout the conference will be the role of social connectedness in health and ways we can leverage the metaverse to strengthen social ties, social support, and tilt social norms toward healthy choices, healthy lifestyles, and healthy communities. This conference will feature keynote speakers and panelists who are studying and innovating tools of the metaverse, including social media, virtual reality, and digital technologies to help us connect in ways that solve health problems.

Since the mid-2010s, chatbots have grown in usage and popularity across the humanitarian sector. While this usage has gained traction, there is scarce information on the collective successes, risks, and trade-offs of this automation. This research addresses this gap, documenting chatbot deployments across the humanitarian sector and exploring the existing uses, benefits, trade-offs and challenges of using chatbots in humanitarian contexts. Related Resources

Unfortunately, that output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem.

accessible best practices for social media content and digital communications

Syndromic surveillance systems monitor disease indicators to detect emergence of diseases and track their progression. Here, we report on a rapidly deployed active syndromic surveillance system for tracking COVID‑19 in Israel. The system was a novel combination of active and passive components: Ads were shown to people searching for COVID‑19 symptoms on the Google search engine. Those who clicked on the ads were referred to a chat bot which helped them decide whether they needed urgent medical care. Through its conversion optimization mechanism, the ad system was guided to focus on those people who required such care. Over 6 months, the ads were shown approximately 214,000 times and clicked on 12,000 times, and 722 people were informed they needed urgent care. Click rates on ads and the fraction of people deemed to require urgent care were correlated with the hospitalization rate ( R2=0.54 and R2=0.50 , respectively) with a lead time of 9 days. Males and younger people were more likely to use the system, and younger people were more likely to be determined to require urgent care (slope: −0.009 , P=0.01 ). Thus, the system can assist in predicting case numbers and hospital load at a significant lead time and, simultaneously, help people determine if they need medical care.

Why are “click here” and “by this link” poor choices? And is it acceptable to use “read more”? In this article, I’ll explain popular wording and formatting mistakes and will show more accessible and informative alternatives.

Amy Jo Kim interviews Casey Means, cofounder of Levels

Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information. Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. Our framework rests on the idea that information can alter people’s action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health. We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure.

7 rules for conversational writing for chatbots

jay bernhardt