unhide® Research Platform Now Available in Spanish
Expanding access to research is not an afterthought in the unhide® digital health platform. It is foundational to how we design and execute our research.
Our team dedicates thousands of hours to developing and maintaining a platform designed to address persistent health disparities in research. We center our work on people who are often underrepresented in clinical studies, underserved in society, and too often treated as invisible. This includes individuals across lines of disability, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, geography, including rural communities, and non-English-speaking populations.
Making unhide® available in Spanish is a critical part of that commitment.
How Do I Benefit?
- No Cost to Participate: There is no cost to join the platform or participate in any of our research studies.
- Participate from Home: Our virtual platform eliminates travel, saving you time and money, and facilitating participation for people with energy-limiting conditions.
- Language Comfort: Access everything in Spanish without worrying about someone translating for you or miscommunication across languages.
- Be Seen and Heard: Ensure that medical research actually includes and represents Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S.
- Track Your Health: Use our tools to document your symptoms and wearable data, creating a clear health history you can share with your doctors.
- Empower Your Care: Turn your daily experiences into data that doctors and healthcare practitioners will take seriously to help find answers for chronic and complex conditions. Note: Your experiences should be enough to get adequate medical care, and it is helpful to have scientific data to demonstrate further need and educate your providers as a self-advocate in medical settings.
Expanding Access to Research Participation
unhide® is built on a remote clinical study model, eliminating the travel burden and high costs of traditional site-based research. This allows us to reach people who face real barriers to accessing care and participating in research, including those living with chronic conditions and debilitating symptoms.
For many Spanish-speaking individuals in the United States, access barriers go beyond geography or cost. Language itself becomes a barrier to participation, understanding, and trust.
“Researchers have a responsibility to ensure that their studies represent the diverse patients affected. To reach our goal, unhide® needs to work for the communities it seeks to serve. By including Spanish-speaking voices, we’re ensuring that the platform we’re building is [more] equitable, accessible, and accurate.”
Why Spanish Access Matters
Spanish speakers in the United States, including those in Puerto Rico and across Mexican, Central American, and broader Latin American diasporas, are often excluded from health research or asked to participate in English. This creates a real risk of miscommunication and limits the accuracy of the data being collected.
In clinical settings, many patients with limited English proficiency rely on family members or friends to translate. Combined with the systemic impacts of racism and xenophobia, this contributes to healthcare and research that too often does not accurately represent the health experiences of Spanish-speaking communities.
Despite being often disproportionately affected by many chronic and complex conditions, Spanish-speaking patients frequently face challenges in having their symptoms recognized, documented, or taken seriously.
Research Participation in Spanish
To address this gap, Brain Inflammation Collaborative has translated studies hosted on unhide® into Spanish with guidance from fluent Spanish-speaking members of our team.
Some examples include:
We are also continuing to expand Spanish-language versions of surveys across our platform and websites to ensure that participation is not limited by language. This work goes beyond direct translation to include thoughtful adaptation of condition names, medical terminology, and survey framing in ways that reflect the cultural contexts of care for Spanish-speaking communities. It is ongoing and central to our mission to increase accessibility and equity in neuroinflammation research.
Turning Lived Experience Into Data
unhide® provides Spanish-speaking patients with the infrastructure to track their symptoms, lifestyle data from wearables, electronic health data, and health patterns over time.
This allows individuals to move from relying on memory to having clear, documented records of their experiences. In a healthcare system that often prioritizes objective data, this shift matters.
By capturing health data over time, patients can enter clinical conversations better prepared, with information that supports clearer communication and more accurate understanding.
In this way, unhide® helps translate lived experience into research-grade data.
Building Toward More Inclusive Research
Expanding Spanish access is not just about translation. It is about building a research ecosystem that reflects the realities of the people it is meant to serve.
When Spanish-speaking communities are included, research becomes more accurate, more representative, and more capable of driving meaningful change.
Through unhide®, this is how we move toward a future where no one is invisible in research.
Many individuals who might benefit most from clinical research are the least likely to hear about it. Patient and community advocacy organizations can help us bridge this gap by connecting us with populations, ensuring that our research reflects the diversity of the patient population. These organizations can reach us at lucia@braininflammation.org.
