Project Summary/AbstractHealth literacy is vital to achieving and maintaining good health. Several national programs have emphasizedthis goal and its importance. Text is generally much more efficient and cost-effective for presenting healthcareinformation on a large scale than interactive tools and videos. Over the past decade therefore most medicalinformation has been provided as text e.g. via printed pamphlets or on websites.We are entering a new era where a new similarly effective mode of information dissemination is becomingincreasingly available: audio accessed with mobile devices. Millions of households have and use smartspeakers and virtual assistants and they are increasingly used by patients and consumers to gatherinformation. Hospitals also plan to gradually integrate them among their tools. However there exist few if anyguidelines on optimal generation and use of audio.The overall goal of this project is to discover how to support the creation of optimal audio from existing textsources for consumer and patient education. To accomplish this four aims are proposed. The first aim is toidentify audio features that affect information comprehension and retention. Here features in audio content andstyle (e.g. word frequency or grammatical complexity) of the underlying information will be tested for impact. Inaddition two groups of features specific to the audio medium will be tested: the delivery features (e.g. speedand pauses) as well as meta-features (e.g. speaker characteristics such as gender or accent and bias inlisteners). This first aim will rely on large-scale datasets semi-automatically generated and augmented withuser scores for comprehension gathered using Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Statistical and machinelearning approaches will be used to tease out the best features and combinations. The second aim focuses ondiscovering how to augment text for audio and finding the optimal combination of text and audio for informationcomprehension and retention. Different combinations will be tested online with MTurk participants usingcontrolled user studies. The third aim is to update test and provide the existing online free text editor togenerate optimized audio. We will also start dissemination of the tool to potential users including API access tocomponents. The project will conclude with a summative evaluation with representative consumers recruited ata local community health center and further dissemination of preferences practical obstacles and bestpractices for the medical community to help increase health literacy through this new popular audio medium.If successful this project will generate best practices for the medical community in using audio as an additionalmethod for bringing healthcare information to the general public; it will provide an online free tool to generateaudio leveraging these best practices and will include API access so that other researchers can easilyintegrate tool components into their research and tools; and it will provide immediate practical lessons fromworking with consumers relevant for clinical practice.