Let's get healthy! health awareness through public participation in an education and research exhibit

Background: Health information technology (HIT) offers a resource for public empowerment through tailored information. Objective: Use interactive community health events to improve awareness of chronic disease risk factors while collecting data to improve health. Methods: Let's Get Healthy! is an education and research program in which participants visit interactive research stations to learn about their own health (diet, body composition, blood chemistry). HIT enables computerized data collection that presents participants with immediate results and tailored educational feedback. An anonymous wristband number links collected data in a population database. Results and Lessons Learned: Communities tailor events to meet community health needs with volunteers trained to conduct research. Participants experience being a research participant and contribute to an anonymous population database for both traditional research purposes and opensource community use. Conclusions: By integrating HIT with community involvement, health fairs become an interactive method for engaging communities in research and raising health awareness.