EFA Patients shaping EU research
EFA’s involvement in EU projects, from design to dissemination, allows us to shape project activities with patients’ real needs to ensure that research outcomes bring concrete improvements to the quality of life of patients.
myAirCoach (EU Horizon 2020 project 2015-2018)
The potential that technology brings to chronic disease patients like asthmatics is enormous, but only a few tools like myAirCoach are being developed directly with patients. In 2017 this mHealth system for asthma self-management became a reality. EFA coordinated the involvement of 22 asthma patients in the project, who participated in all the work leading to the mobile application of the smart-inhaler adapter and the air quality monitoring device. Their volunteer advice within the Advisory Patient Forum (APF) has made it possible for myAirCoach to respond to patients’ needs first, and to build up a system that collects exactly the information necessary for an optimal monitoring by their healthcare professionals, including environmental pollution and indoor air quality data. In 2017, the APF brought in the patients’ perspective to the researchers, doctors and engineers not only on the device itself, but also on the educational components and the virtual community that facilitate patient empowerment and peer-support. The system was also presented by the APF Coordinator, EFA Project Manager Giuseppe De Carlo at the eHealth Week in Malta. The APF members marked World Asthma Day with a lay publication on the findings of a myAirCoach study around patients and healthcare professionals’ perspective on mHealth for asthma self-management. After three years of work, the whole myAirCoach self-management system will be tested by patients in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom and will be ready by June 2018.
@myAirCoach
Cure (EU Horizon 2020 project 2017-2021)
Current treatments allow many asthma patients to control their disease. However, medicine is not yet capable of proposing a cure to this chronic respiratory disease, the most common in childhood and lined to allergy. In 2017 we launched CURE, an EU research project to explore if viruses could cure asthma. The hypothesis that will be analysed by our project partners is if bacterial viruses (phages) are able to control the bacterial populations and reinstate the balance within asthmatic airways after infections. EFA will drive the dissemination of the project whose final aim is to propose a phage therapy to control the immune dysregulation of asthma and eventually… be able to cure it!
@Cure_asthma