SBIR-STTR Award

The long-term objectives of this study are to develop and evaluate the effectiveness of an interactive, digital multimedia, cervical cancer education kiosk for low-income, less educated Latinas. The specific aims are to identify salient themes about risk factors and screening to guide the design of messages tailored to a woman's age and risk exposure level. Another aim is to explore a new generation of digital video technology for delivering tailored messages to Latinas, a population with the nation's highest age-adjusted cervical cancer incidence rate, and a mortality rate 1.5 times higher than non-Hispanic white women. The study will conduct formative research to identify Latinas' knowledge, attitudes and screening behavior for cervical cancer through a combination of focus groups, ethnographic interviews, key informant interviews and a questionnaire. These data will guide the content development of cervical cancer education modules. A technical evaluation of a prototype will be conducted to determine the feasibility of integrating off-the-shelf advanced DVD technology into an interactive, multimedia kiosk. The technological innovation of this project stems from re-purposing advanced, digital video technology to create an interactive, multimedia kiosk that is a robust, portable and flexible health education platform for delivering cervical cancer education to a medically underserved population.

Although cervical cancer mortality rates declined by approximately 1.8 percent annually in the past decade among women in the U.S., the mortality rate for Latinas increased during this time period at a rate of 0.2 percent per year. The long-term goal of this study is to develop a cervical cancer education intervention for low-income, low literacy Latinas to address this health disparity. The specific aims of this study are to: (1) develop culturally and linguistically appropriate cervical cancer screening messages, (2) develop interactive, multimedia kiosks to deliver the education intervention, (3) evaluate the efficacy of the intervention to promote Pap screening, and (4) evaluate the acceptance of the interactive, multimedia kiosks by the target population. The multimedia kiosks will integrate emerging technologies to create next-generation digital kiosks that deliver stunning full-motion video with crisp digital images and sound in compact, mobile, reliable and cost-accessible units. Interactive multimedia digital kiosks have great potential as a cancer education platform in the $931 million health education media market. These kiosks can reach multiple population groups with a single product through custom-tailored messages at a significant price point. The study employs a randomized, pre-test and post-test, control-group experimental design. A total of 900 low-income Latinas will be accrued at one rural and two urban community clinics in California. Study participants will be randomly assigned to either an experimental or control condition in equal numbers after they are administered a pre-test. The experimental group will be exposed to a multimedia cervical cancer education intervention while the control group will receive a cervical cancer brochure, which represents standard care for cervical cancer education. Six-months from baseline, a post-test will be administered to both treatment and control groups. These data will be analyzed using chi-square tests to compare the study arms to determine behavioral and attitudinal outcomes, as well as change in self-efficacy and decisional balance. Multivariate models will be used to examine covariates of the intervention effect.

Thesaurus Terms:
Hispanic American, cervix neoplasm, education evaluation /planning, educational resource design /development, interactive multimedia, low socioeconomic status, neoplasm /cancer education academic achievement, attitude, culture, health behavior, health disparity, human mortality, medically underserved population, women's health behavioral /social science research tag, clinical research, female, focus group, human subject, interview, patient oriented research