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Peer Link

PI: Laura Schopp, Ph.D.

Persons with disabilities have high need for timely and complex information coordination and resource sharing, but there are few existing supports to meet these needs. Internet-based structures that do exist rely heavily on third parties to maintain and update information, resulting in high upkeep cost and limited direct control by users with disabilities.

PeerLink is a novel disability informatics initiative that will develop an information management system. The highly disseminated system will allow users to share information instantaneously with others, and to selectively share personal and local community resource information according to their own specifications. The PeerLink team brings to bear expertise in disability issues, informatics, and adaptive computing. PeerLink will create information innovation in three major goal areas:

1) Peer-to-peer information transfer model: Develop, seed, and implement a highly disseminated, agile information system to promote effective service integration by enabling efficient consumer-directed information transfer;

2) Knowledge management: Convert tacit local resource information held by knowledgeable community members with disabilities in order to make vetted information more broadly available to other community members when and where they need it through the PeerLink system;

3) Graphic representation: Capitalize on an existing information dissemination user interface to allow access to geographically-based visualization of data for local disability resources.

The PeerLink initiative enjoys the support of the local disability community, and will be replicable and scalable to other communities to promote rapid dissemination.

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