Personalized and blended care solution with virtual buddy for child health
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E-Health solutions may be effective for health promotion in children, but often reach only a part of the target group. Our objective is to create equal opportunities for all children through ePartners4All, a personalized blended care solution. We will develop and evaluate the ePartner4All system in co-creation with end-users.
There is a large challenge to advance the physical and mental health of children, especially in groups with low economic status and children with special needs or specific health problems. Approximately 145 000 children in the Netherlands have disabilities in communicative and social-emotional skills. There is a workforce shortage of physicians, nurses and teachers. Schools have a tight school curriculum with very limited space for additional support to children. There is hardly any sharing of information between schools and preventive youth healthcare services, and limited availability and fragmentation of personalised interventions.
In this project, we take digital support of school-aged children and their caregivers a big leap forward, by not only monitoring their health, but also providing interactive e-health solutions (so-called ePartners), including robot buddies and virtual agents that enhance children’s health and well-being. A needs assessment, ePartners4All development, and pilot study will be performed in co-creation with end-users. These ePartners can help to prevent health problems in at-risk children, and it can help to recognise and treat health problems at an early stage, thereby preventing deterioration of the problem. In this way, ePartners4All can help to create a more resilient society. Altogether, it could lead to lower healthcare utilisation and, in the long run, a more resilient workforce with lower losses of productivity.
European research
ePartners4All has been funded by TKI Life Sciences & Health and supported by Innosuisse – Swiss Innovation Agency. Project started in November 2021 and will last for 30months.
The total budget has been estimated to 1,4M€.