Sherine El-Toukhy, Ph.D., M.A.
Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator
Dr. Sherine El-Toukhy staff profile | Lab members
Scientific Expertise
Digital health, mobile health (mHealth), health disparities, behavior change, health communication
Research and Programmatic Interests
Interests include leveraging digital technologies (e.g., mobile and wearable devices) to improve minority health and reduce health disparities. Specifically, Dr. El-Toukhy conducts epidemiologic, (bio)behavioral, and clinical research to examine disparities in access and use of digital technologies; designs and evaluates mHealth interventions, particularly smoking cessation interventions; and identifies ways that digital technologies can inform health and medical care.
Research Projects
Smokefree.gov: Text-Messaging Smoking Cessation Interventions
The lab examines retention, engagement, and abstinence outcomes among users of Smokefree.gov text messaging interventions by race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Smokefree.gov consists of U.S. national text-messaging smoking cessation interventions that are publicly available through the National Cancer Institute’s Smokefree.gov Initiative. The lab examines these outcomes in SmokefreeTXT that targets the general population of adults who smoke, SmokefreeTeens that targets adolescents who smoke, SmokefreeMom that targets pregnant women who smoke, and SmokefreeTXT en Español that targets Hispanic/Latino individuals who smoke.
Quit Journey: mHealth Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) for Smoking Cessation
The lab engineers and assesses the efficacy of an mHealth smoking cessation intervention, Quit Journey, targeting adults with low socioeconomic status who smoke. To develop and evaluate the intervention, we conduct a series of studies including:
- Formative studies to determine the acceptability of new intervention components and the feasibility of recruiting people who smoke with low socioeconomic status.
- A proof-of-concept study to determine if the intervention produces a meaningful effect on smoking cessation.
- An optimization experiment to determine the main and interactive effects of intervention components followed by a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the optimized intervention against standard care.
Electronic Health Records (EHR): Auto Screen and Referral of Populations at High Risk
To increase the uptake of digital behavioral change interventions, the lab determines the acceptability, feasibility, and reach of an EHR-based auto screen and referral electronic text messaging system that refers adults who smoke cigarettes or drink alcohol at risky levels to behavioral change mobile applications.
Individuals at high risk are identified through available data in the EHRs. The central hypothesis is that using EHRs to promote mobile applications for behavior modification will produce a clinically meaningful increase in the proportion of a hospital’s patients at high risk who click on a link to behavioral change mobile apps in an auto-referral text message.
Wearable Devices: Remote Monitoring of Health Conditions
The lab uses wearable devices to collect physiological data to demonstrate the potential of wearable devices as diagnostic and monitoring health tools that can inform health and medical care.
In one study, the lab identifies wearable-based biometrics (e.g., heart rate, respiratory rate) that are associated with long COVID-19 in a cohort of 550 non-hospitalized patients with a positive COVID-19 diagnosis.
In another study, the lab evaluates sleep-time blood pressure, measured via a wrist-worn wearable device, as a clinically significant and independent marker of chronic kidney disease in a cohort of 200 patients with chronic kidney disease.