SCORe: Using Sonification to COmmunicate public health Risks

Can we effectively communicate the risks of excessive alcohol consumption, to improve young people's health, though interactive media?

The SCORe Project was a collaboration between the Departments of Theatre, Film and TV at the University of York, UK, where the PI Sandra Pauletto was a Senior Lecturer prior to moving to KTH, and Health Sciences at the University of York. It was funded by the Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders (C2D2 https://www.york.ac.uk/c2d2/) of the University of York, supported by the Wellcome Trust (https://wellcome.ac.uk), and aimed to find new ways to communicate health information to young people effectively using interactive media. In particular this project focused on the communication of alcohol consumption data for the UK.

Excessive consumption of alcohol has been recognised as a significant risk factor impacting the health of young people. Effective communication of such risk is considered to be one key step to improve behaviour. We evaluated an innovative multimedia intervention that utilised audio and interactivity to support the visual communication of alcohol health risk data.

Building on a previous multidisciplinary project titled Jane’s story-Chronic health issues of adolescents: is the world listening? (https://www.york.ac.uk/c2d2/news/janes-story/), which employed the communicative qualities of sound and music to communicate health issues, we hypothesised that a combination of film music techniques and sonification may influence how effectively and accurately one recalls information and potentially increase engagement (i.e. interested involvement) with a visual presentation of data.

This is one of the first studies on the use of sonification and music as support to health communication interventions, and it showed that our approach of using multiple modes of communication is interesting to young people and worth replicating in future studies.

This work provides a model for the design of future studies in this highly interdisciplinary and fertile area of research at the intersection between sound design, sonification, music, health communication, and interactivity.

Team

Sandra Pauletto (PI)
Bartolomej Walus
Amanda Masons-Jones

Sandra Pauletto
associate professor

pauletto@kth.se , +4687906823

Profile

Funding

Centre for Chronic Diseases and Disorders (C2D2) of the University of York, supported by the Wellcome Trust.

Publications

[1]

B. P. Walus, S. Pauletto and A. Mason-Jones, "Evaluating the use of sonification and music to support the communication of alcohol health risk to young people: initial results," in International Conference on Auditory Display 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria | 6 - 10 July 2015, 2015.

[2]

S. Pauletto and B. P. Walus, "Reflecting on the Role of Sound in an Immersive Multimedia Intervention for Health Communication," in Reflecting on the Role of Sound in an Immersive Multimedia Intervention for Health Communication, 20/11/18 → 23/11/18, Italy, 2018.

[3]

B. P. Walus, S. Pauletto and A. Mason-Jones, "Sonification and music as support to the communication of alcohol-related health risks to young people. Study design and results," Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 235-246, 2016.

[4]

B. Walus, S. Pauletto and A. J. Mason-Jones, "SOUND AND MUSIC IN INTERACTIVE SONIFICATION : A NOVEL WAY TO COMMUNICATE THE HEALTH RISKS OF ALCOHOL TO YOUNG PEOPLE," in SoniHED : Conference on Sonification of Health and Environmental Data, 2014.