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Keeping users engaged with mHealth applications is important but difficult to achieve. We describe the development of a smartphone-based application designed to promote health and wellness in church communities, along with mechanisms explicitly designed to maintain engagement. We evaluated religiously tailored techno-spiritual engagement mechanisms, including a prayer posting wall, pastor announcements, an embodied conversational agent for dialogue-based scriptural reflections and health coaching, and tailored push notifications. We conducted a four-week pilot study with 25 participants from two churches, measuring high levels of participant acceptance and satisfaction with all features of the application. Engagement with the app was higher for users considered to be more religious and correlated with the number of notifications received. Our findings demonstrate that our tailored mechanisms can increase engagement with an mHealth app 

Churches have historically played an important role in Black American communities, catalyzing the pursuit of aims such as social justice, community organization, and health promotion. However, researchers have rarely examined how technology can support an assets-based approach to these efforts, nor the implications of race, traditions, and history when creating such systems. Addressing this gap, we conducted research with two predominantly Black churches to explore health promotion design opportunities. We used photovoice, a research method where participants led their own data collection and analysis. Participants provided nuanced descriptions of the racial and ethnic identities of their communities, and how church history and aspirations for the future impacted these identities. Our findings characterize tensions between tradition and ‘modernization,’ implications for technology design, and the need for a temporal approach to understanding communities. We conclude with broader implications for studying the intersection of race and religion in community technology design. 

Culturally informed design for virtual agents has been shown to positively impact health outcomes when tailored to target audiences. We present a participatory design methodology for culturally tailoring virtual agents. Investigators worked with key informants from our target population, members of predominantly Black church communities, to design culturally-relevant and sensitive virtual agent health promotion interventions. In the first participatory session, key informants designed agents to assist them with different aspects of their lives, providing input on agent appearance and agent functionality. In a second design session, participants re-wrote the content of a health conversation with an agent, to include personally-relevant content related to their community (e.g., religious and scriptural references). We report design principles for religious tailoring derived from these studies. We conducted a validation study to assess the effects of applying these principles to agents that promoted two health behaviors, finding that participants responded very positively to the tailored agents.