My Health Coach (FASD)

My Health Coach offers adults with FASD evidence-based education about their condition and tools to promote their own self-management and health advocacy goals. My Health Coach is grounded in self-determination theory and integrates well-established behavior change strategies. It uses a just-in-time adaptive intervention design and a simple and engaging chatbot interface. This will provide adults just the right type and amount of support, when they are most receptive.

This project is a partnership with identified leaders in the adult FASD community, known as the Adult Leadership Collaborative (ALC). Their motto is: “Nothing About Us Without Us.”

This study is led by Drs. Christie Petrenko and Cristiano Tapparello. Dr. Petrenko is faculty at Mt. Hope Family Center and has appointments in the departments of Psychology and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester. Dr. Tapparello is faculty in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Rochester and is the Director of Software Engineering at the UR Medicine Health Lab. They will oversee all research staff, implementation of human subjects’ protections, and data collection, management, analysis, and reporting.

This research is funded by a grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism as part of the Collaborative Initiative on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (CIFASD). The content is solely the responsibility of the developers and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism or the National Institutes of Health.

You can learn more about CIFASD and other research projects you may be able to participate in at https://cifasd.org/.