Everywhere in the world, people are on the move.
There has been a steady increase of immigrants, refugees and international students settling in new countries. Canada, for instance, is aiming to welcome 500,000 new immigrants by 2026, including refugees.
Research has revealed the "Healthy Immigrant Effect” (Newbold, 2006), showing that Immigrants arrive in Canada healthier than non-immigrants, but the longer they live in Canada, the more they lose this health advantage.
Social determinants of health factors contribute to declining health outcomes; these include language barrier, social isolation, unaffordable housing, discrimination, difficulty finding family doctors and work that comensurates with one's qualification.
Our approach is to help newcomers develop capabilities, e.g., to have good physical and mental health, social connections, the ability to play, control over their material environment (e.g., housing, employment, transportation), etc. We want help them to be who they want to be.
Our Solution:
The Newcomer App encourages users to make concrete plans to address their own well-being, by recommending actions/resources and allowing users to read content and ask questions in their own language. We use open-sourced AI models in the app to enable personalized recommendation, language translation, question answering and automatic content curation.
Explore a personalized and translated feed of tips, events, organizations, sponsored content.
Filter content by newcomer-relevant tags, such as language, immigration status, etc.
Plan actions, receive suggestions, browse related organizations and events, and log their experience.
Ask questions to a chatbot or to another person, all in your own language.
Moving to a new location for a visit, temporary stay or permanent move, and struggling with system navigation and language barriers.
Having growing responsibilities to help newcomers navigate the systems and integrate into the community.
Interested in introducing their services, products, programs, events, courses to newcomers.
The project started in May 2023 as an intiative at University of Waterloo, in partnership with the KW4 Ontario Health Team and supported by the Graham Seed Fund.
We interviewed 50 immigrants and refugees in 9 different languages and members of 16 newcomer-serving organizations. Newcomers told us what capabilities are most important to them, and how these capabilities evolved during their transition to Canada.
We met with 22 newcomers and 7 organizations to brainstorm features for the app. The goal was to gather diverse user-generated design ideas, without worrying about technically feasibility.
We developed an initial prototype to address four newcomer challenges: the need for knowledge, connections, self-expression and support for managing the bigger picture. We presented a demo at the World Summit AI Conference in Montreal in April 2024.
Help us launch the Newcomer App and make the health equity a priority in Canada!
We are currently interested in: