What we do
About our project
Living with a chronic disease
In the Netherlands, approximately 1 million (one in four) children are affected with a chronic disease. A chronic disease impacts every aspect of a child’s life, such as the ability to play outside with friends or go to school. Compared to healthy peers, children with a chronic disease have a two to four times higher chance to develop psychological problems, such as loneliness, anxiety, depression, and/or psychosomatic problems.
Available interventions
Currently, opportunities for early identification and preventive interventions of psychological problems of chronically ill children are underutilized. This is due to limited availability of and access to validated preventive care for this vulnerable group. More than ever, mental health services for children are overburdened while the needs still increase.
Our project aim
The ambition of our consortium, including (applied) researchers, pediatricians, psychiatrists, psychologists, patient organizations, knowledge centers, game designers, industrial designers, insurance companies, and business professionals, is to unleash the widely recognized potential of preventive eHealth. Our mission is to prevent psychological problems, by making scientifically validated eHealth tools that allow personalized and transdiagnostic prevention of psychological problems, widely available for chronically ill children in the Netherlands (and beyond) through an accessible, user-friendly, safe, and sustainable platform.
See for more information: www.ehealthjunior.nl
(Please note: the website is in Dutch)
Our research focus
The eHealth Junior consortium is divided into three clusters, all of which work together but have a separate research focus.
Cluster I: Development Distil and validate the theoretical and game-design factors that make eHealth effective for chronically ill children.
Main research questions:
-
What are the mechanisms of healthy (game) play among chronically ill children?
-
How can we offer personalized and trans-diagnostic prevention in an attractive, young mode, and how can eHealth tools be adapted to children with a chronic disease and improved for large-scale uptake?
Cluster II: Evaluation Evaluate trans-diagnostic and personalized eHealth tools for chronically ill children using and developing state-of-the-art methods.
Main research questions:
-
How can we develop, apply, and improve data analytical methods to obtain more detailed individual insights and make (future) eHealth apps adaptive and personalized?
-
What is the effectiveness of eHealth in terms of longer-term effect, the module- and person-specificity, and costs?
Cluster III: Implementation Understand and remove the barriers that hinder implementation and uptake and threaten availability of eHealth applications for chronically ill children.
Main research questions:
-
Which barriers, ranging from technological, legal, financial, human, and organizational, are most hindering in multi stakeholder implementation and uptake processes?
-
How can we successfully address the urgent societal call of children, families, and professionals for an accessible, safe, and sustainable eHealth platform?
Funds & Grants
The eHealth junior consortium (with project number NWA.1292.19.226) is part of the the NWA research program ‘Research on Routes by Consortia (ORC)’, which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
