Pandemics! Heatwaves! Floods! Droughts! We live in an age of overlapping crises. Climate change is intensifying. Acute, short-term stressors and chronic, long-term stressors damage physical and mental health. Such stressors are not going away. We need to develop resilience to these stressors. But what IS resilience? Read More
Resilience, is: “the ability of people, households, communities, countries and systems to mitigate, adapt to, and recover from shocks and stresses.”
So how can we help people develop resilience? Worldwide, technology is ubiquitous: cellular networks, the internet, laptops, smartphones. How can we best combine these powerful technologies with innate human resilience and community wisdom? And what if we could turn all the data into a lifeline – a way to not just survive, but to bounce back stronger?
That is the promise of Resilience Informatics. Resilience Informatics is a new, people-centric discipline aiming to significantly improve: the development of tools; and the ability of people to overcome health stressors like Climate Change, disease outbreaks, and forced displacements. It brings together Data science, Artificial Intelligence, and information and communication technology.
Resilience Informatics improves Public Health by helping communities recover from extreme disruption to their health.
Dr. Sriram Iyengar and his colleagues at the University of Arizona, conceived of the need for resilience-boosting tools during the Covid pandemic – a time when survival depended on immediate behavioral changes in people.
AZCOVIDTXT – a simple text messaging-based solution, sparked and supported resilient behavior from thousands in the Phoenix Metropolitan area – by providing the right information, and the right motivation at the right time.
Based on this experience, and with support from partners including the Burroughs Welcome Fund and Dr Arletty Pinel, MD, in Central America, Dr. Iyengar and his team designed a framework for the development of Resilience Informatics Systems that puts people first at every component and stage of the design.
Behavior change can be a necessary part of developing resilience. Resilience Informatics uses ideas and principles from Persuasive Technology to support people in coping behavior without coercion. Yet, no solution fits all. At the heart of this work is a simple idea: resilience is local. It must be built with the people, based on the natural drivers of resilience in the society it’s meant to protect. In a world of accelerating change, resilience is not a luxury – it’s a necessity.
Resilience informatics is a bridge – between science and society, between data and decisions, between crisis and recovery. This is more than innovation. It’s empowerment. It’s about giving every community – no matter how remote or at-risk – the tools to protect health, dignity, and hope. Let’s build resilience together.
