Cancer Nexus Blog

The Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Cancer-Focused Pilot Project Program was initiated by the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences to provide funding for cancer-focused projects at UMass Chan Medical School. Funding for these pilot projects was provided by the UMass Cancer Center, the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences, and the National Cancer Institute (through a multi-center P50 grant iDAPT: Implementation and Informatics – Developing Adaptable Processes and Technologies for Cancer).

In its inaugural year, The Population and Quantitative Health Sciences Cancer-Focused Pilot Project Program awarded funds for two projects. One of the projects was awarded to the team of Rajani S. Sadasivam, PhD, professor of population & quantitative health sciences, and Elise M. Stevens, PhD, assistant professor of population & quantitative health sciences, for their project entitled "Using psychophysiological technology to develop a mood-tailored intervention for smoking cessation (Adapt2YourMood)". Using their combined expertise — Dr. Sadasivam in computer engineering, digital health, and tobacco cessation, and Dr. Stevens in health communication related to tobacco — they ultimately aim to address health disparities in tobacco use, where populations from lower socioeconomic backgrounds have higher smoking rates.

One way to reach these populations is through computer-tailored health communication, which personalizes messages according to the users’ demographic characteristics. Drs. Sadasivam and Stevens want to further improve the tailoring of these messages by taking the user’s mood into account, as has been a longstanding practice in the business world to influence consumer purchasing behavior. Dr. Stevens points out, “Customers are in a specific mood state; we know what messages to give them to encourage them to change their purchase behavior. They’ll buy the product if we give them a specific message. But this hasn’t been looked at with health behavior. So it’s exciting to use this new element of mood to see how it will impact responses to these messages.”

Watch Drs. Stevens and Sadasivam discuss the funded pilot project below.