A Personalized Avatar-Based Web Application to Help People Understand How Social Distancing Can Reduce the Spread of COVID-19: Cross-sectional, Observational, Pre-Post Study.

We developed a web application to help people understand the relationship between individual-level behavior and population-level effects in the context of an infectious disease spread. This study also demonstrates how agile development can be used to quickly create personalized risk messages for public health issues like a pandemic. The nonrandomized design of this rapid study prevents us from concluding the application's effectiveness; however, results thus far suggest that avatar-based visualizations may help people understand their role in infectious disease transmission.