Auburn scientist designs health messages for underserved communities

When Veena Chattaraman was working as a designer in India, she noticed she was different from her colleagues. While they were focused on the craft of design with busy hands, Chattaraman’s mind was always working — asking questions about why consumers made certain decisions.

“I was interested more in psychological issues,” she said. “‘Why do consumers do what they do? What goals and motivations underlie their choices? What’s the identity they want to project?’”

It was not long until this researcher — disguised as a designer — decided to pursue a doctorate in consumer sciences.

Now as a professor in Auburn University’s Department of Consumer and Design Sciences within the College of Human Sciences, Chattaraman has spent over 18 years applying her consumer science expertise to topics that align with her values, including connecting older adults and rural communities with health information through innovative technologies and approaches.

“I like to draw from basic research in consumer psychology and apply it to benefit people and communities,” she said. “For me, the solution to many societal problems lies in interdisciplinary applied research. I enjoy seeing scientific knowledge applied to impact people in a beneficial way.”

Ahead of the curve with AI

Chattaraman’s time in a job that was a wrong fit had a silver lining: she knew exactly what type of job would be well suited for her.

“I really enjoy design. I really enjoy being creative, but I felt my true interest lay in research and giving back to society,” she said.

After landing a tenure-track position at Auburn in 2006, Chattaraman was ready to put her values into action as a researcher. She began by doing what she does best: observing consumers around her.

Chattaraman noticed a digital divide; older adults were hesitant to shop for groceries and prescriptions online, even though doing so could help them manage their needs from the comfort of their homes. She began to work with her colleagues to uncover older adults’ barriers to online shopping.

In a series of focus groups with older adults, they found older adults lacked trust in and familiarity with online shopping. As early as 2008, she was curious whether AI, specifically conversational AI, could help overcome these barriers.

“Our first challenge was to see how this technology can benefit older adults and keep them more independent in their functioning — whether it is ordering online or using their pharmacy online,” she said.

Chattaraman collaborated with faculty in Auburn’s Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering to design and develop conversational agents or chatbots. Together with her colleagues, she received two grants from the National Science Foundation.

Among their findings, Chattaraman and her colleagues discovered that virtual agents can help increase trust and social support for older adults while online shopping.

What’s more: they found that conversational agents that were multimodal — leveraging both voice and text language — reached older adults best due to improved understanding and circumventing vision problems. Chattaraman said this finding makes sense, given that older adults may have hearing and vision declines that make either only voice or text-based communication challenging.

“Importantly, language emerged as the medium to unlock the usefulness of AI technology, and we saw that right at the beginning,” she said.

Creating AI-powered grocery store interventions for rural communities

As society’s interest in language-based AI skyrocketed, Chattaraman experienced a setback in her own life. She faced a personal illness that led her to take time off work.

“When I came back, I reevaluated everything that I was doing because I realized the importance of health to life,” she said. “It was a time of deep reflection and change.”

Chattaraman developed a newfound interest in nutrition, especially in addressing the nutrition divide in rural communities that may lack access to healthy foods and information about healthy eating. She observed how highly processed products — such as cereal and processed snacks — get all the advertisement love and shelf space in grocery stores.

But fruits and vegetables aren’t as lucky.

“Unhealthy foods are marketed with such passion,” she said. “Let’s give more voice to fruits and vegetables.”

Since there’s not much space on an apple to grab a person’s attention, Chattaraman is exploring how messages provided through digital channels, known as digital health nudges, may relay some of this health information in small stores where rural adults grocery shop.

She is collaborating with the Hunger Solutions Institute to identify rural retailers that could be partners across Alabama. The Institute provides economic incentives to SNAP eligible consumers through its Nutrition Incentive Program. Chattaraman hopes to amplify these economic incentives by implementing information nudges through a novel, store-based digital channel.

“We want to be able to design messages in a way that matches consumers’ health goals, so they are more likely to take action on them,” she said. “We also want to leverage the power of generative AI in exploring how rural grocery retailers can use this resource-efficient technology to promote healthier choices in their stores.”

Chattaraman’s background in design also comes in handy, helping her create more visually appealing digital nudges. But research isn’t the only place where Chattaraman applies both sides of her curious brain.

In the classroom, she teaches a range of courses, including social psychology and aesthetics of design related to consumer behavior.

“I like to teach a wide variety of courses that emphasize higher-order skills. Some are more thinking-based, and some are more skill-based,” she said. “It just balances out your left and right brain.”

Across these different courses, Chattaraman is invested in helping students reach their professional goals.

“Students come to the College of Human Sciences with strong values and aspirations for their own and our collective future,” she said. “I truly enjoy contributing to and learning from such intrinsically motivated students and being a part of their unique academic journeys.”