Jessie Chin

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign | UIUC · School of Information Sciences

In this study, we used a word search puzzle paradigm to investigate age differences in the rate of information gain (RG; i.e., word gain as a function of time) and the cues used to make patch-departure decisions in information foraging. The likelihood of patch departure increased as the profitability of the patch decreased generally. Both younger a...

Background Patient knowledge about the purpose of medications is crucial to ensure safe and correct use, so it is an important index of adherence in patients with chronic illness.Objective We examined how health literacy and its components (processing capacity and knowledge about illness) influence memory for medication purposes.DesignWe conducted...

Background The vaccination uptake rates of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine remain low despite the fact that the effectiveness of HPV vaccines has been established for more than a decade. Vaccine hesitancy is in part due to false information about HPV vaccines on social media. Combating false HPV vaccine information is a reasonable step to ad...

Smart-environments deploy an ecology of smart devices such as voice-assistants (VA), telehealth portals, and smart-fireplaces to support aging in place by providing assistance, remote-assessment, and restoration. Although asking for support is a foundational task within a smart environment, the socioemotional implications of asking smart devices fo...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/54800.].

UNSTRUCTURED In “Assessing the Feasibility and Acceptability of Smart Speakers in Behavioral Intervention Research With Older Adults: Mixed Methods Study” (J Med Internet Res 2024;26:e54800) the authors would like to make an addendum to the Acknowledgements: The corrected text should read: This work was supported by the University of Illinois Chica...

The global population is rapidly aging, necessitating technologies that promote healthy aging. Voice User Interfaces (VUIs), leveraging natural language interaction, offer a promising solution for older adults due to their ease of use. However, current design practices often overemphasize functionality, neglecting older adults' complex aspirations,...

Background Smart speakers, such as Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Nest Home, combine natural language processing with a conversational interface to carry out everyday tasks, like playing music and finding information. Easy to use, they are embraced by older adults, including those with limited physical function, vision, or computer literacy. While smar...

In this Institute of Museum and Library Services planning grant, the Team is examining the partnerships between libraries and community emergency response by focusing on three key areas: 1) types of emergencies that libraries have responded to in the past; 2) scope and nature of library-community partnerships; and 3) role of libraries during a c...

Little research has investigated the design of conversational styles of voice assistants (VA) for adults in their later adulthood with varying personalities. In this Wizard of Oz experiment, 34 middle-aged (50 to 64 years old) and 24 older adults (65 to 80 years old) participated in a user study at a simulated home, interacting with a VA using eith...

Importance The study highlights the potential and limitations of the Large Language Models (LLMs) in recognizing different states of motivation to provide appropriate information for behavior change. Following the Transtheoretical Model (TTM), we identified the major gap of LLMs in responding to certain states of motivation through validated scenar...

In older adulthood, positive perceptions of one’s own aging can facilitate enrichment seeking–the underlying motivation to seek out new experiences and perform intellectually challenging activities–by diminishing and buffering reactions to perceived threats to one’s sense of self and perceived capabilities. In this study, we examined the extent to...

BACKGROUND Smart speakers, such as AmazonTM’s Echo and Google’s Nest HomeTM, combine natural language processing within a conversational interface to carry out everyday tasks, like playing music and finding information. Easy-to-use, they are embraced by older adults, including those with limited physical function, vision, or computer literacy. Whil...

In this paper, we describe our approach to bridging the designer-user gap by engaging 20 older adults in codesign workshops to generatively re-imagine health-related voice agent (VA) design for voice user interfaces (VUI) for older adults, by older adults. Drawing on recent research in Library and Information Science (LIS), we describe codesign as...

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are popular among older adults, who find them easy to use and perceive them as social companions. However, there is a lack of research on voice-based applications to support physical activities for older adults. To address this gap, we present "Workout Pal," a voice agent designed to deliver physical activities to older...

This study aims to investigate the prevalence of Health Influencers’ Instagram content that could lead to negative impacts on mental health and body image. With the collected Instagram posts and associated metadata of top ranked Health Influencers, we performed content analysis on the most used hashtags, an unsupervised topic model to examine the s...

We present "Mystery Agent," an interactive storytelling voice user interface (VUI) equipped with self-regulated learning strategies to deliver informal health-related learning to older adults through a murder mystery story. We conducted a mixed methods user study with 10 older adults to evaluate Mystery Agent, using usability and perception-based q...

Intensified preventive measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as lockdown and social distancing, heavily increased the perception of social isolation (i.e., a discrepancy between one's social needs and the provisions of the social environment) among young adults. Social isolation is closely associated with situational loneliness (i.e., lonelin...

We defined enrichment seeking as the capacity for adults to engage in the novel and intellectually challenging activities for exploring diverse experience. Although enrichment seeking is associated with cognitive resilience in older adulthood, the tendency for older adults to adopt explorative behavior decreases with age in concert with decline in...

Older adults protect their well-being under stressful experiences by carefully selecting their environments, social interactions, and tasks. This bias toward positive over negative experiences may reduce engagement in novel, intellectually challenging, or social complex activities that promote healthy aging over the long term. Environments that fos...

In this paper, we present Health Buddy, a voice agent integrated into commercially available Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) to support informal self-regulated learning (SRL) of health-related topics through multiple learning strategies and examine the efficacy of Health Buddy on learning outcomes for younger and older adults. We conducted a mixed-fac...

We argue that the concept of health literacy, in itself, is less important than lifespan psychological models integrated with a human factors engineering approach for explaining the role of abilities, skills, beliefs, and other mental resources for self-care among older adults and for designing supports for effective self-care. We describe a proces...

Health literacy (HL) is critical to find, understand and use health information for adopting appropriate health behavior, especially during a pandemic crisis in which people can be exposed to an overwhelming amount of information from different media. To this end, we conducted an online study to first validate the measure of COronaVIrus Disease app...

Heightened social isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak puts individuals at greater risks of loneliness (Bu et al., 2020) where elevated levels of loneliness are closely associated with depression (Killgore et al., 2020; Palgi et al., 2020; Weeks et al., 1980). Prior research has suggested that lonely individuals are more likely to seek mental hea...

The rapid growth of the off-the-shelf smart speakers (such as Amazon Alexa and Google Home), also called Conversational Agents (CAs), creates potential to deliver everyday life support to users at home (such as checking weather, listening to news, scheduling events). Literature demonstrated the technology acceptance of CAs among older adults (inclu...

Advances in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics have made smart speakers, such as Amazon Alexa^TM^ and Google Home^TM^, economical and widely available. For older adults particularly, devices with voice interfaces can help to overcome accessibility challenges that often accompany interaction with today’s technologies. However, voi...

The purpose of this study is to examine the communicative relationship between older adults and conversational agents (CA), such as a Google Home Mini, to understand if and how interaction with AI-based voice technology affects perceptions, technological adoption, and, ultimately, human-machine communicative behaviors. Using the Communication Accom...

BACKGROUND The vaccination uptake rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine remain low despite the fact that the effectiveness of HPV vaccines has been established for more than a decade. Vaccine hesitancy is in part due to false information about HPV vaccines on social media. Combating false HPV vaccine information is a reasonable step to addres...

Conversational agents (CAs) are becoming increasingly prevalent and permeating into our daily lives. We conducted a between-subjects design experiment to examine the effects of age and interaction types on the perceptions about social abilities of CAs among 25 older (aged 60 or more) and 26 younger adults. Bridging the Computers are Social Actors p...

With the prevalence of commercially available conversational agents (CAs), little research examined the capacities and constraints of these devices to support adults to learn new information on their own. The article conducted systematic analysis on the commercially available CAs (using work domain analysis and literature review), synthesized the m...

The implementation of evidence-based physical activity (PA) programs for older adults is limited in part due to the administration-related personnel costs. The rapid growth of the off-the-shelf smart speakers, conversational agents (CAs), demonstrates the potential of scalable delivery of PA programs to older adults at home. We implemented a PA vir...

The goal of the study is to identify and track the dissemination patterns of true and false information about Human Papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines on twitter from 2013 to 2017. We applied a patient-driven HPV-vaccine risk lexicon combining with natural language processing (NLP) models and network analyses to explore the spread of verified true and f...

While the virality of misinformation has been recognized as one of the significant global issues in the modern societies, few studies had examined the computational approaches to represent and identify false information in health domains. The current study aimed at using both psycholinguistic and natural language processing models to represent veri...

Background: Many behaviour-change technologies have been designed to help people with a sedentary lifestyle to become more physically active. However, challenges exist in designing systems that work effectively. One of the key challenges is that many of those technologies do not account for differences in individuals’ psychological characteristics....

Given the access to online health information is no longer a problem, continuous growth in health information seeking has been observed. The goal of the study was to explore the triggers, information needs, contemporary technologies and habits of health information search behavior across the lifespan. The population who seeks online health informat...

The purpose of the study was to identify and assess multiple aspects of patient portal usage behavior in an underserved urban patient population. Given the rise of patient-centered care, patients are required to take active roles to gather health information, make informed health decisions and manage their own healthcare, which behavior were associ...

As the Internet has become one of the dominant sources of health information, online health information plays an important role for patients to acquire health knowledge and regulate their health behavior (European Commission, 2014). Researchers suggested different ways to nudge public health behavior through environments and policies (Marteau et al...

Objectives: We know little about how electronic health records (EHRs) should be designed to help patients, pharmacists, and physicians participate in interprofessional shared decision making. We used a qualitative approach to understand better how patients make decisions with their health care team, how this information influences decision making...

Heart failure is a chronic disease requiring careful attention to self-care. Patients must follow instructions for diet and medication use to prevent or delay a decline in functional status, quality of life, and expensive care. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in heart failure patients’ knowledge of important care routines, their cognit...

Summary: 1.Objectives The study is to examine how physicians and pharmacists collaborate to perform medication therapy management (MTM) through Electronic Medical Records Systems (EMR), Pharmacy Management Systems (PMS) and Electronic Health Records Systems (EHR), and how the collaboration and interactions with EMR/PMS/EHR varied across different h...

Cognitive science is a science of intelligent systems. This chapter proposes that cognitive science can provide useful perspectives for research on technology-mediated human-information interaction (HII) when HII is cast as emergent behaviour of a coupled intelligent system. It starts with a review of a few foundational concepts related to cognitiv...

Objective This study investigated how older adults’ representations of hypertension relate to their illness experience (years of illness), health literacy and self-rated health. Design Correlational study. Setting Community-based older adults diagnosed with hypertension. Method We measured health literacy (Short Test of Functional Health Literac...

In this study, we evaluated the ability of computational cognitive models of web-navigation like CoLiDeS and CoLiDeS+ to model i) user interactions with search engines and ii) individual differences in search behavior due to variations in cognitive factors such as aging. CoLiDeS and CoLiDeS+ were extended to predict user clicks on search engine res...

This paper describes the first of three experiments conducted to investigate the efficacy of a proposed persuasive mHealth messaging intervention that motivates individuals to become more physically active. In order to develop a set of persuasive health messages that can be used in the principal experiment, which examines a particular message-tailo...

We designed and developed an email intervention that sends participants daily health messages. The messages were adapted from those used in similar studies which investigated the effect of message framing to promote physical activity and their persuasiveness were rated in a prior study by a group of participants whose demographic characteristics ma...

Purpose of the study: Older adults' self-care often depends on understanding and utilizing health information. Inadequate health literacy among older adults poses a barrier to self-care because it hampers comprehension of this information, particularly when the information is not well-designed. Our goal was to improve comprehension of online healt...

This study focuses on the impact of age, prior domain knowledge and cognitive abilities on performance, query production and navigation strategies during information searching. Twenty older adults and nineteen young adults had to answer 12 information search problems of varying nature within two domain knowledge: health and manga. In each domain,...

While learning in a multitext environment increases with the rise of electronic environments, little is known about what makes learners feel that they should continue learning or already learn enough from one text. The current study aimed at examining what cues learners use to regulate their effort among multiple sources in a multitext environment....

When learning about a single topic in natural reading environments, readers are confronted with multiple sources varying in the type and amount of information. In this situation, readers are free to adaptively respond to the constraints of the environment (e.g., through selection of resources and time allocation for study), but there may be costs o...

Older adults make many decisions about their health, in part because they are the most frequent patients in a health-care system that places a premium on patient engagement and decision making. They face complex health-related decisions that involve receiving care from multiple providers for interacting chronic and acute conditions. Older adults wi...

Past research often found that older adults searched less in terms of browsing and generating keywords; few studies examined the processes and underlying mechanism that caused the age-related reduction on search. In the current study, about 20 younger and 20 older adults performed ill-defined search tasks with a search box we implemented. In additi...

Purpose of the Study: Health literacy is associated with health outcomes presumably because it influences the understanding of information needed for self-care. However, little is known about the language comprehension mechanisms that underpin health literacy. Design and Methods: We explored the relationship between a commonly used measure of heal...

This paper looks at two limitations of cognitive models of web-navigation: first, they do not account for the entire process of information search and second, they do not account for the differences in search behavior caused by aging. To address these limitations, data from an experiment in which two types of information search tasks (simple and di...

L’étude présentée s’intéresse à l’effet de l’âge, du domaine de connaissances et de la complexité des questions sur la production de requêtes et la navigation dans des tâches de recherche d’informations. Vingt adultes âgés et dix-neuf jeunes adultes ont eu douze questions de recherche à effectuer dans deux domaines de connaissances différents : la...

Understanding and acting on online health information is increasingly a prerequisite for patient self-care. Therefore, inadequate health literacy is a barrier to self-care among older adults with chronic illness. The goal of our study was to improve older adults' comprehension of online health information. We extracted typical health texts from mul...

While there is evidence that knowledge influences understanding of health information, less is known about the processing mechanisms underlying this effect and its impact on memory. We used the moving window paradigm to examine how older adults varying in domain-general crystallised ability (verbal ability) and health knowledge allocate attention t...

The authors explore the role of technology in supporting collaboration between health care providers and older adults. They focus on two technologies that help link patients to their providers by giving them access to health information and services: 1) patient portals to Electronic Health Records, and 2) Personal Health Record systems. Theories of...

Understanding patient skills, abilities, and other resources related to health literacy is crucial for improvement of self-care knowledge and behaviors. The current study explored links between cognitive abilities, knowledge, and reading engagement within the framework of process-knowledge model of health literacy (e.g., Chin et al., 2011) as measu...

This study used a word search puzzle paradigm to examine the effects of task environment and individual differences in ability on information foraging. Younger and older adults attempted to maximize the number of items found in a set of 4 puzzles in which they were at liberty to search within a puzzle or switch between them. Younger adults demonstr...

The authors explored knowledge effects on comprehension of multimedia health information by older adults (age 60 or older). Participants viewed passages about hypertension, with text accompanied by relevant and irrelevant pictures, and then answered questions about the passage. Fixations on text and pictures were measured by eye-tracking. Participa...

An empirical study was conducted to investigate how older and younger users learned by performing exploratory search of health information using an interface that recommended relevant links based on browsing histories. While older and younger users gained both factual and structural knowledge about the health topics, significant age differences wer...

An empirical study was conducted to investigate how older and younger users learned by performing exploratory search of health information using an interface that recommended relevant links based on browsing histories. While older and younger users gained both factual and structural knowledge about the health topics, significant age differences wer...

The authors explore the role of technology in supporting collaboration between health care providers and older adults. They focus on two technologies that help link patients to their providers by giving them access to health information and services: 1) patient portals to Electronic Health Records, and 2) Personal Health Record systems. Theories of...

Synonyms Dual enrollment; Interactive abilities Definition Interactive skills refer to the general ability to interact with the external world to accomplish a task. A typical interactive task requires the person to look for relevant information and choose the right actions. The complexity of an interactive skill increases as (1) the uncertainty of...

We investigated the effects of domain-general processing capacity (fluid ability such as working memory), domain-general knowledge (crystallized ability such as vocabulary), and domain-specific health knowledge for two of the most commonly used measures of health literacy (S-TOFHLA and REALM). One hundred forty six community-dwelling older adults p...

While there is much evidence that health knowledge supports understanding of health texts, little is known about the processing mechanisms underlying this effect. We used the moving window paradigm to examine attentional allocation to reading health and domain-general texts among older adults with hypertension who varied in verbal ability (general...

We studied hypertensive older adults' processing of multimedia (text and picture) displays of hypertension information, and how reading patterns related to hypertension knowledge and passage comprehension. Eye movements of 23 older adults were tracked as they studied 4 text-picture passages. Eye movements were analyzed during and after participants...

We present results from an experiment that studied the information search behavior of younger and older adults in a medical decision-making task. To study how different combination of tasks and interfaces influenced search strategies and decision-making outcomes, we varied information structures of two interfaces and presented different task descri...

We investigated how cognitive abilities and illness experience relate to illness knowledge. One hundred and forty-eight community-dwelling older adults including hypertensive patients and healthy adults completed a battery that measured illness knowledge, fluid cognitive abilities, crystallized abilities, and health history. Results suggested that...

Previous research has shown that older adults performed worse in web search tasks, and attributed poorer performance to a decline in their cognitive abilities. We conducted a study involving younger and older adults to compare their web search behavior and performance in ill- defined and well-defined information tasks using a health information web...

Previous research has shown that older adults performed worse in web search tasks, and attributed poorer performance to a decline in their cognitive abilities. We conducted a study involving younger and older adults to compare their web search behavior and performance in ill- defined and well-defined information tasks using a health information web...