Obtaining pregnancy and infant health information can be overwhelming and complex. Students on the U-M School of Nursing’s VIP Partners project will leverage U-M Generative AI tools to create a one-stop, trusted, intuitive healthcare resource that provides users individualized responses to their questions.
Abstract:
The mission of UM School of Nursing’s VIP Partners: Virtual Initiatives for Pregnancy and Infancy Partnerships is to promote health equity for pregnant people, infant caregivers, and their infants by eliminating health disparities, pregnancy-related deaths, and infant mortality. They aim to accomplish this through a virtual, client-centered, community-oriented mobile-friendly website providing perinatal education, infant anticipatory guidance, and personalized social services acquisition.
The student team will develop a mobile-friendly website that supports a one-stop-shop of resources for pregnant people, parents, and infant caregivers from preconception through pregnancy and their infant’s first year of life. The website will incorporate UM based generative AI tools (e.g., Maizey) to deliver individualized, evidence-based educational materials, and personalized strategies for community resource acquisition from trained public health professionals.
The system will likely be developing utilizing the following tech stack: Figma for UI development and web design and React (back end functionalities, APIs, GenAI,….).
Build-out of a mobile-friendly website incorporating the following functionality:
- Intuitive UI and navigation, tailored to the user community, to support successful delivery of content.
- Deliver a wide range of educational materials created by VIP Partners or other trusted sources.
- Utilize UM Generative AI tools to select information based on user questions and provide responses tailored based on a range of demographic information (e.g., age of the user, reading level of the user, month in pregnancy or age of infant, home address, other medical information, past questions, etc.)
- Support a user experience guided towards educational information, encouraging next steps to register for health coaching.
- Chat/messaging and email feature where messages to the health coach would be directed to their inbox, and the health coach could respond to these messages directly from their inbox.
- Provides a patient information page to support health coaching.
- Integrating APIs for Zoom, Qualtrics, popular external calendaring (Google Calendar, iCal, etc.)
- Incorporates build appropriate to HIPAA (health privacy) security.
Impact:
A personalized, targeted comprehensive pregnancy and infant care app that can provide individualized responses will promote health equity for pregnant people, infant caregivers, and their infants by providing timely and accurate health info, and access to healthcare experts. This should work towards eliminating health disparities, pregnancy-related deaths, and infant mortality, particularly in marginalized communities.
Scope:
Minimum Viable Product Deliverable (Minimum level of success)
- Conduct a thorough literature and technology review, including identification of similar outreach endeavors in pregnancy support and other fields, cybersecurity standards for HIPAA, utilization of generative AI, User Experience best practice, gamification/learning effectiveness with target user group, etc.
- Define user requirements through interviews and feedback.
- Develop a functional prototype without real, personally protected health information.
- Collect stakeholder feedback and create a refinement plan.
- Ensure AI functionality meets ethical standards.
Expected Final Deliverable (Expected level of success)
- Deliver a refined, user-tested system.
- Verify stakeholder satisfaction and needs alignment.
- Provide a strategic analysis of project outcomes and recommendations for next steps.
Stretch Goal Opportunities: (High level of success)
- Develop interactive, personalized educational components.
- Implement a production-ready, HIPAA-compliant server.
Below are the skills needed for this project. Students with the following relevant skills and interest, regardless of major, are encouraged to apply! This is a team based multidisciplinary project. Students on the team are not expected to have experience in all areas, but should be willing to learn and will be asked to perform a breadth of tasks throughout the two semester project.
Front End/Back End Programming (2-3 Students)
Specific Skills: General Programming skills, good software engineering practice and design, willingness to quickly develop new tech stack skills.
EECS 281 (or equivalent) is required.
EECS 485 Web Systems would be a plus.
Likely Majors: CS, DATA
UI/UX (2 Students)
Specific Skills: Craft and conduct user/stakeholder interviews, collect user needs data, develop a range of personas, adherence to best practices in UI/UX design, design and conduct focus group testing of product.
(Students must have basic coding/prototyping skills and be prepared to participate in technical development at times.)
Likely Majors: SI, ARTDES
Generative AI (2 Students)
Specific Skills: Practical skills in incorporating generative AI models, curating training data, developing prompts.
EECS 281 (or equivalent) is required.
EECS 485 Web Systems and/or EECS 484 Database Management would be a plus.
Likely Majors: CS, DATA
Additional Desired Skills/Knowledge/Experience
Strong candidates will have familiarity or experience with some of the following items, and a positive attitude to learn what is necessary, as the project gets underway. If you have any of these characteristics, highlight them on your Experience and Interest Form and talk about them in your (optional) one way video interview.
- Strong interest in public health and effective communication.
- Successful team-based project experience.
- Practical experience in generative AI modeling applications.
- Experience working with privacy protected data such as HIPAA, FERPA, etc.
- Experience with GIS data.
- Experience with developing systems for security (particularly HIPAA compliance).
- Experience designing and managing focus group testing of stakeholders.
- Experience with any of the following technical platforms (please describe your experience in your (Experience & Interest Form) Figma for UI development, Flutter /Node.js, GitHub, cloud based services and providers such as AWS.
- Experience with APIs, interfacing web-apps with available services (Google Maps, social media platforms).
- Web design experience both front end and back end in any of the following platforms: Python-based: Flask or FastAPI; Plotly Dash or React + Plotly.js; React and Node.js (express.js) or next js for JavaScript-based.
Sponsor Mentor
Dr. Amy Buckenmeyer
Dr. Buckenmeyer is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Nursing. She is an experienced community-based participatory researcher and consultant with an established record of transformation in the public health sector at the local, state, federal, and international levels. She holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in Nursing Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, a Master of Public Health (MPH) from George Washington University, and a Master of Science in Nursing (MSN) from Marquette University in Advanced Practice Nursing for Children. Her expertise is in community capacity building to improve health equity for marginalized populations through the novel integration of a theoretical and methodological approach to community health needs assessments, interventions, and evaluations.
Faculty Mentor
Simeone Marino
Simeone has a joint appointment as Research Associate Scientist in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Michigan Medical School and a Research Computer Specialist position at the School of Nursing. His work is largely in Data Science and Big Data Analytics in the SOCR – Statistical Online Computational Resources group, led by Prof Ivo Dinov. Simeone’s research interests span from machine learning to developing methodologies and protocols for handling and sharing Big Data.
Weekly Meetings: During the winter 2025 semester, the U-M School of Nursing VIP Partners team will meet on Thursdays from 10 AM – 12 PM in the School of Nursing. Location TBD.
Work Location: Most of the work will take place on North campus in Ann Arbor.
Course Substitutions: CE MDE, ChE Elective, CS Capstone/MDE, EE MDE, CoE Honors, SI Elective/Cognate
Citizenship Requirements: CPT declaration (curricular practical training) is NOT required for this project because the sponsor is part of the University.
IP/NDA: Students will sign standard University of Michigan IP/NDA documents.
Summer Project Activities: No summer activity will take place on the project.
Learn more about the expectations for this type of MDP project