Please join us on Wednesday 25th March, 15:30 to 16:30 in the Butler Room, Nuffield college for our upcoming seminar.
In this talk, Dr. Andrés Colubri will begin by introducing the novel concept of app-based epidemic games (“epigames”) to study the adoption of health-seeking behaviours, particularly in the context of infectious disease outbreaks, and how this concept was operationalized through the Epigames app developed in his lab. He will then describe an instantiation of a recent epigame study, consisting of a two-week randomized controlled trial (N=567) conducted at a university campus in the Middle East to evaluate the external validity of the approach, as well as the impact of economic costs and individual beliefs on voluntary quarantine. Using the app, his team leveraged Bluetooth technology to sample participant contact networks and simulate a respiratory virus outbreak. Participants were randomized into two groups with differing opportunity costs (in-game points) for adopting voluntary quarantine within the game. Real-life and in-game health beliefs (including perceived susceptibility, severity, self-efficacy, and benefits) were measured via surveys to parameterize a Health Belief Model and assess correlations. Preliminary analysis reveals that high economic barriers significantly reduced quarantine adoption among participants with low in-game motivation. Furthermore, the contact network exhibited assortative properties across several belief variables. These findings suggest that economic barriers act as a “gatekeeper” for quarantine during the game, suppressing action among sceptical individuals while allowing highly motivated participants to act. The significant correlation between real-life beliefs, in-game beliefs, and network structure indicates that epigames are a valid experimental tool for network-aware behavioural epidemiology.
Biography:
Dr. Andrés Colubri is an assistant professor in the Department of Genomics and Computational Biology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School. He holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina, a Burroughs Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship in computational biology at the University of Chicago, and an M.F.A. from the Design Media Arts Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Andrés' career has navigated science, art, and technology through multiple transdisciplinary collaborations. His lab now brings together computational scientists, software engineers, and visual designers to develop new methods and tools for infectious disease research (https://co-labo.org/). One of the lab’s main projects consists in advancing the use of app-based epidemic games (“epigames”) for experimental epidemiology and mathematical modeling. Epigames allow researchers to collect real-world data on how human behavior influences infectious disease transmission across various socio-cultural contexts and transmission modes, and to construct more advanced models for predicting disease spread in human populations.