Researchers want your answers to optimize a health app that will prevent disease

Together with six European countries, the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research is developing a health app for smartphones that will reduce and prevent the risk of disease. The researchers now want answers from you in a survey to optimize the app.

WARIFA is an EU-funded project that aims at developing a general personalised early risk assessment tool in a smartphone app. It will be used to support preventive measures and lifestyle changes for people with non-communicable diseases. These are mainly cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases, which are the main causes of premature death in Europe.

The researchers now want answers from you in a survey to make the app as good as possible. At first, it is the clinicians and organizations the researchers want answers from in order to optimize the software.

The survey takes 10-15 minutes to complete and you will be anonymized.

Answer the WARIFA survey here:

Clinicians: (healthcare professionals, doctors, hospitals)

Organizations: (only representatives of organizations. Healthcare professionals respond to the links above)

Motivate a healthier lifestyle

Thanks to this risk assessment tool based on automatic processing of both user-generated and big data stored in a central system, citizens will be informed about the risk of developing a certain disease which they previously may not have been aware of, or about a known disease getting worse. A special feature of the WARIFA tool will be the possibility to advise citizens who are at risk of getting several diseases at the same time. Recommendations addressing the different diseases will be merged and balanced in order to avoid conflicting advice.

The WARIFA app will be conceived with a user-friendly graphic interface helping to assess the need for preventive measures on an individual and person-centred basis. Furthermore, the app will provide a personalized set of recommendations on lifestyle according to the individual risk profile developed by the AI technology. Citizens are motivated to improve unhealthy habits while good lifestyle choices are supported. Those individuals at a very increased risk are advised to get in touch with the health care system.

Prevention

– The WARIFA project focuses on chronic lifestyle-related conditions that share one important feature: individual citizens who are aware of risks to their own health have a good chance of preventing these diseases by changing risk behaviours. Thanks to our project, citizens, including vulnerable, high-risk, or “hard to reach” groups, will be provided with a self-monitor tool and individual recommendations for preventive measures to adopt healthier habits and a better lifestyle, says WARIFA-coordinator in Norway, Thomas Schopf, who is a doctor and researcher at the Norwegian Centre for E-health Research.

EU cooperation

The WARIFA project started on the 1st January 2021; its first-class international consortium includes a total of 12 partners from 6 countries and represents expertise within AI technology, e-health, preventive medicine, clinical medicine, epidemiology, sociology, psychology, biostatistics, communication and dissemination.