Crowdsourcing transforms public health messaging

The bouncy tune sounds like it’s meant for the dance floor or your Spotify favorites. Then you hear the lyrics.

“If you feel it in your chest, you need to take some rest. Hypertension. . . Take the pressure, know your levels. Exercise, eat right.”

It’s a public health intervention, embedded in a song and created through the crowdsourcing work of Carolina’s Dr. Joe Tucker and his team. Tucker, professor in the UNC School of Medicine, uses global crowdsourcing to develop ways to improve people’s health.

Seeking a unique way to educate people on signs of high blood pressure, the research team held a Nigeria-wide open call. In a Nature Medicine article, the team described the crowdsourcing process and made suggestions for including people with disabilities in public health communications.

Singers from the Bethesda Home and School for the Blind performed a version of the catchy song mentioned above, with the pidgin English name “Check Am.” The group then refined their song through a designathon, a three-step activity involving “preparation with end-users, intensive collaboration and follow-up research.” The new version of “Check Am” received the third highest score from the judges.

Tucker has organized more than 200 crowdsourcing open calls to improve health, including 23 global open calls. Finalist ideas have informed regional, national and global efforts to prevent diseases and to promote vaccinations. Participants collaborate on a solution design to increase public awareness of specific health challenges. Experts on the contest topic or community partners evaluate submissions, then award prizes.

Tucker’s interest in crowdsourcing began in China, where he accessed big data sets and large groups of people. “The public health opportunities for collective wisdom were exciting,” he said. “Groups can solve problems that individuals or experts might struggle with.”

Dr. Joe Tucker’s team has capitalized on the potential of digital collaboration to improve public health messaging. (Megan Mendenhall/UNC Research)

He also saw the potential of digital collaboration. In 2024, Tucker’s team produced a guide on designathons and health research, and crowdsourced methods for creating designathons and collecting research literature.

“It’s been fun to think critically about this participatory activity in public health interventions. Communities hold innate strength and wisdom, yet we often overlook them. This is a chance for researchers and communities to collaborate more deeply,” Tucker said.

Talking with people in the communities affected by health problems, whatever their age — teens in Nigeria to elders in the United Kingdom — is important after an open call submission moves to the collaboration phase. The best ideas from collaboration are used to develop an intervention that the group tests in a clinical trial.

“Our research suggests that people in the community can be a powerful force for change, and they have exceptional ideas that can help to transform health services,” Tucker said.

Besides Tucker, the research group includes two faculty from the medical school:

• Weiming Tang, epidemiologist, associate professor and co-director of UNC Project China
• Suzanne Day, sociologist and research assistant professor

Tucker is also co-director of UNC Project China and a member of the UNC Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases.

The researchers train graduate students, medical students and undergraduates to focus on infectious diseases and social medicine. One is Takhona Hlatshwako ’22, who earned a bachelor’s degree in public health at Carolina and was named a Rhodes scholar. She earned two advanced degrees from Oxford University, then entered a UNC doctoral program. As an undergraduate, she worked in research at Gillings, with the Carolina Population Center and the Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases.

“The trainees remind me that the future is bright,” Tucker said.