The spread of health related information through communities and social networks is a topic that I’ve touched on a few times.  There have been a number of studies highlighting the importance of social networks for such dissemination, with a growing appreciation for the importance of targeting specific individuals within a community.

Of course, the diffusion of information is often an ongoing process, and there have been a number of technology driven attempts to drive home behavioral change.  For instance, I wrote earlier this year about the effectiveness of text messaging for behavior change in healthcare.

A recent study looked at the role mobile games can play in this process, especially ones that take a humorous stance.

The researchers, from Carnegie Mellon, have developed a mobile phone based game, code named Polly, has been deployed in Guinea over the past few months in a bid to help reduce the spread of Ebola in the country.

The game is designed to be simple.  A caller records a message via it, and Polly then adds amusing sound effects to the message.  It might make a male voice sound female, for instance, or create the impression it’s a drunken chipmunk on the line.

The message can then be forwarded on to the callers friends, who can also forward it on to their own, and so on.  The simplicity of the game means that anyone can use it providing they have a simple phone.  The hope is that this will help the game go viral.

Spreading health messages

The game first tested itself in Pakistan a few years ago, before then being deployed in India.  There, the service was used to spread information around job openings, but in Guinea the aim is to encourage the spread of health information that will be provided by both the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Guinean Ebola Coordination Unit.

“We knew that one of the problems was a lack of information, particularly in remote areas and in the local languages, which was exactly what we try to alleviate with Polly,” the makers say. “Our hope is to reach enough people to make the epidemic weaker.”

Whilst the technology itself is cheap, the air time needed to deliver the messages often isn’t.  That was one of the reasons why Polly was initially tried in Asia, as running costs are considerably less than they often are in Africa.

“To us, getting inexpensive air time is critical because we’re going to be making hundreds of thousands of calls,” they say. “We’re targeting people who might make one or two dollars a day, so we can’t make users pay for it.”

It’s certainly an interesting approach.  I wrote last autumn about a similar project that was using MOOCs to help spread information about Ebola.  The plan there was for those able to take the course to then act as conduits by which the information spread throughout their communities.

Both projects are an interesting example of how more grassroots projects can be used to spread good health messages throughout communities.