Digital Vaccines – Can This AI Tool Save Us from Ourselves?

The following is a guest article by Dr. Neecey Hudson, PhD – Founder & Chief Scientist at Hood Medicine Initiative.

Pandemic preparedness has now become a paramount concern across the globe. From vaccine supply chain logistics to hospital capacity management, many nations have failed to provide competent response measures that equitably protect their citizens and reduce the spread of infection, while low and middle-income countries (LMICs) are facing enormous challenges to do so. This global crisis has tested our ability as a civilization to respond to public health emergencies and mitigate the impact of geopolitical interference impeding our collective adherence to sensible policies geared towards disease prevention. Innovative, low-cost interventions are needed to supplement traditional measures in a manner that is irrespective of coordinated government provisions.

One thing upon which all experts can agree is that multilayered approaches to combating communicable diseases optimize herd protection. For airborne viruses like SARS-CoV-2, this includes not only vaccination programs, but also testing and tracing protocols, social distancing, masking, and other physical barriers to infection. However, economic, political, and social pressures have worked in concert to deprioritize the implementation of preventative measures in many countries. In addition, public health communications efforts have been thwarted by targeted disinformation that easily takes hold amidst a concurrent infodemic wherein people are unsure of the trustworthiness of data as well as sources of information.

Effective public health communication is the cornerstone of any pandemic response. The more informed the population is, the better they can assess their own personal risk and make the best choices to keep themselves and their loved ones safe. The COVID pandemic was itself plagued with a unique blend of misinformation, antivaxxer campaigning, conspiracists, racially-tinged stigmatization, and disregard for vulnerable populations, making it harder for public health officials to cut through the noise with resonant messaging. Without an understanding of risk, it can be difficult to drive the adoption of preventive behaviors and make convincing calls to action that people feel compelled to take.

With the ubiquity of smartphones and connected devices, the concept of Digital Vaccines has emerged as an indirect method of health behavior change. Evidence-based prevention approaches to behavioral nudging that can slow the spread of communicable diseases by decreasing the potential for commingling between infected and uninfected persons. This novel approach draws upon knowledge from the fields of behavioral health, communications, computer science, neuroscience, heuristics, and psychology to implement technology that attempts to circumvent the bias and distrust that had occluded rational decision-making for many throughout the pandemic. But what do Digital Vaccines look like, who is developing them, and how will they be regulated?

Hood Medicine & PathCheck Foundation recently participated in a panel discussion on digital vaccines with Bhargav Sri Prakash, Founder & CEO of FriendsLearn, a biotech firm that pioneered the technology. He is the lead tech partner for the Digital Vaccine Project at Carnegie Mellon University for which he just secured the world’s first digital vaccine patent. This tool is deployed as a gamified application that uses neurocognitive training to disseminate behavioral nudges that promote positive health actions to reduce disease risk. What is less clear is how they might be regulated, but early clinical trials of the application being used for promoting health eating behaviors in children and adolescents show great promise for the reproduction of health outcomes in those cohorts.

“Our focus right now is on validation in young children, and the platform builds on years of insights and research findings on how to stimulate neural pathways in the juvenile brain. However, neuroplasticity exists across the age spectrum, so we are currently using computational modeling to understand how to adapt our methods in adults,” Prakash indicates. In targeting developmental stages, their technology is optimized for early intervention at the habit formation stage of neurodevelopment, the prime entry point for effective health behavioral modification. He is optimistic about the prospects of translating this application for older users, “The depth of data we have on the efficacy of early trials have given us an entire ecosystem to understand both the user data and telemetric data to get a sense of how the program is working at a mechanistic level, which would inform how we scale the current application to adult populations.”

Can game-based learning work on protecting adults’ health as well, helping to achieve what failed public health communications and pandemic management tactics could not? It certainly has potential, if it is pitched to the public in the right way. Based on how easily other pandemic countermeasures have been subverted by cynicism and propaganda, it may be most effective if launched much more subversively, perhaps ensconced in a commercial application like Waze or a weather app. Introducing it to users may require as much consideration of persuasive computing as its development. However, if it is successful, it could change the way we conceive of public health solutions. Much in the same way that mRNA vaccines pushed us forward into the future of medicine, so too artificial intelligence and digital tech will hopefully usher in adaptation of new platforms to prevent the spread of infection on a population scale.

About Neecey Hudson, PhD

Neecey is a Computational Biologist with a BS in Biology from MIT and an interdisciplinary PhD in Pharmacology & Toxicology, Biostatistics & Bioinformatics, and Bioengineering from the University of Louisville. She currently works in Health Equity research and Public Health Communications. She directs the research division and communications group at Hood Medicine.

   

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