Finalist category: Digital Health Award
#T4GXploro
Digital Health Award, Finalist, 2020
Xploro is a clinically proven Digital Therapeutics platform that uses augmented reality, gameplay and artificial intelligence to deliver health information to young patients, reducing the anxiety associated with hospitalisation, improving health literacy and fostering better engagement with health services.
Xploro consists of a mobile app for patients, a web app for parents and a management portal for clinicians. The mobile app uses 3D augmented reality models, an artificially intelligent Avatar Guide and a series of games to introduce patients to hospital environments, staff and processes.
Xploro was developed as a result of the personal experience of co-founder, Dom Raban. In 2011 Dom received the tragic news that his 13 year old daughter, Issy, had been diagnosed with cancer. Now Issy is cancer-free, but when she was ill nobody told her what to expect and that made her feel scared, anxious and alone. But this experience isn’t unique to Issy…
There is strong evidence that children who are poorly informed about health interventions and have poor health literacy, experience higher levels of anxiety and stress which can be long-lived and lead to poor engagement with health services and poorer health outcomes. Xploro aims to address this.
By putting health information in the hands of children, using language they understand and interaction paradigms that they are familiar with, Xploro aims to reduce their anxiety and improve their clinical outcomes. By reducing the fear associated with procedures Xploro aims to reduce repeat procedures and shorten treatment times.
By encouraging patients to give feedback on their treatment, Xploro enables clinicians to better manage their care. Finally, by improving child health literacy Xploro provides the foundations for a generation of patients better able to self-manage their healthcare. The project was originally targeted at children with cancer, but the long-term goal is to build a health information platform for any patient, of any age, with any condition, anywhere in the world.
