How an app will help manage allergies in children
Food allergies in children are becoming increasingly common. The problem is that when they occur for the first time, they can have serious consequences, such as allergic shock. In this case, an overreaction of the immune system causes a life-threatening situation. In order to prevent this as far as possible, children with an increased risk of allergies are to be identified by artificial intelligence (AI) with an app as part of a research project - and thus sustainably protected from serious consequences.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
In the future, the NAMIBIO app will help healthcare professionals and parents of children at high risk for food allergies to prevent a disease and increase tolerances at an early stage. NAMIBIO stands for food allergy biomarker. The idea behind it actually sounds quite simple, but it has a lot going for it: the app works on the basis of huge data sets that are managed and retrieved via artificial intelligence. Ultimately, it aims to help doctors and parents determine the risk of food allergy and provide recommendations for targeted prevention options. "In a first step, we determine the needs of the app's different target groups, i.e., healthcare professionals as well as parents of children at increased risk," explains Dr. Susanne Brandstetter, a research associate at the University of Regensburg's Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which is located at KUNO Klinik St. Hedwig.
Brandstetter is part of the supra-regional research network NAMIBIO-App, consisting of the universities of Regensburg, Magdeburg, Leipzig and the Charitè in Berlin as well as the app developer NeoPrediX start-up company, which is working on this innovative form of prevention and prediction of food allergies. The group is researching which causes and factors play a role in the development and progression of allergies in childhood. Among other things, it can draw on data from the KUNO Kids study at the Hedwigsklinik in Regensburg.
As part of the "User Perspective and Evaluation" subproject, a team from the Chair of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at the University of Regensburg and a team from the Institute of Social Medicine and Health Systems Research at Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg are jointly focusing on how parents and health care professionals interact with the digital offering. "Our goal is to derive recommendations for the development of digital health apps for parents and health personnel and then to evaluate these newly developed apps," says Institute Director and head of the subproject Prof. Dr. Christian Apfelbacher from the University of Magdeburg.
Currently, the recruitment of study participants is entering its first round. In the end, concrete recommendations for the development of practicable health apps for parents and medical staff are to emerge, which will then also be made accessible to all those affected.
The overall project will run until 2024. The NAMIBIO app research network is one of a total of five networks funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) as part of the "Interdisciplinary Research Networks on Food Intolerances" funding measure. The ministry is providing a total of around 12.5 million euros for all projects.
Note: This article has been translated using a computer system without human intervention. LUMITOS offers these automatic translations to present a wider range of current news. Since this article has been translated with automatic translation, it is possible that it contains errors in vocabulary, syntax or grammar. The original article in German can be found here.
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