Despite the many advances in the global fight against infectious diseases and the millions of lives saved by vaccines and other preventive and therapeutic methods, infections remain a major threat to humanity, COVID-19, has remined us of the devastating effects that pandemics can have globally. Beyond the clear prominence of SARS-CoV-2, however, malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and multidrug-resistant bacteria remain major causes of morbidity and mortality.
Science4Pandemics will develop a digital platform to educate the public on the prevention and management of pandemics.
What is S4P?
Science4Pandemics (S4P)
Penta is partnering in Science4Pandemics (S4P) – a three-year European project funded by EIT Health and coordinated by the Fundació Sant Joan de Déu – that aims to develop a digital platform to educate the public on the prevention and management (P&M) of pandemics. Targeting the adolescent population, S4P will use gamification and artificial intelligence for enhancing the public’s understanding of P&M of pandemics.
Why is S4P needed?
Digital gamification helps citizens to learn efficiently, while at the same time enabling them to become active providers of data on a voluntary basis. The digital platform will use AI algorithms to collect data that will allow researchers to learn from ordinary citizens (e.g. about symptomatology, horizontal and vertical disease spread, strains and behaviours)
What is S4P’s developing?
The S4P Game
S4P is developing a digital game to learn how to prevent and manage future pandemics. It promotes resource-management and decision-making skills during a pandemic event to generate behavioral change. The consortium is now running testing sessions on the game together with young people between 12 and 18 years old! The players are supporting the developers in creating the game. Register to play here.
The S4P citizen science projects
The digital platform of S4P has launched two questionnaires for adolescents between 12 and 17 years old, as well as for their parents, to collaborate with the project and provide real data for participatory research on vaccines and clinical trials. The first questionnaire is about vaccine hesitancy and aims to find out how young people perceive vaccines. The second questionnaire is about clinical trials and aims to identify preferences for the use of digital technologies in clinical trial participation among young people.
This project has received funding from the EIT Health under Grant Agreement 220365.
