Breaking the Barriers of Language and Literacy to Access Health Apps
Accepting Students
We are seeking an individual who would like to apply for the master’s program (AI emphasis) in the Health Systems Research (HSR) concentration at the Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation (IHPME). The HSR Program application deadline is November 15, 2023.
The problem that we would like to address is the inequity of access to mobile health apps because the majority of such apps are designed for English-speaking consumers who are literate. This has led to the inability of many consumers to use these health apps, many of whom may benefit the most from them. The overall objective of the larger project is to explore how health apps can be designed to enable their use by people who speak different languages and have varying literacy levels. Specifically, the MSc student’s thesis will be focused on expanding the features of existing health apps at the Centre for Digital Therapeutics to support non-English speaking patients who may have low literacy or who are illiterate.
Required Skills and Responsibilities: The candidate should have an undergraduate degree in the Engineering/Biomedical or Computer Science Field. The potential candidate should have the following skills:
- Proficiency in Python programming and data analysis.
- Experience with Speech-to-Text technologies and the integration of spoken language data into AI applications.
- Experience with Large Language Models (LLM) and fine-tuning.
- Familiarity with Prompt Engineering techniques for controlling LLM behavior.
The candidate will be supported for their thesis at both the University of Toronto and University Health Network. Please review the admission guidelines for the MSc: HSR Program. The candidate will be co-supervised by Dr. Emily Seto and Dr. Shumit Saha.
Interested candidates should send an email to shumit.saha@uhn.ca, with the subject line “MSc-HSR”. Only the shortlisted candidates will be reached out for an interview.
Lead Faculty
Emily Seto
