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The project will be developed within the framework of a research project of the Aragon Health Research Institute through the APE Foundation.
Aragón is going to pioneer an interactive virtual space to detect eating disorders (ED) in adolescents early. The application has been promoted by the APE Foundation and its scientific validity will be tested this year in two educational centers in the Community.
The project will be developed within the framework of a research project of the Aragon Health Research Institute, with the aim that its implementation can be extended in the 2024/2025 academic year to all Aragonese schools and institutes.
This was announced this Wednesday by the Ministers of Education and Health, Claudia Pérez Forniés and José Luis Bancalero, after the meeting they held with the founders and trustees of the APE Foundation, Carlos Peralta and Chelete Echechiquía.
As Peralta explained, with this technological tool, it will be possible to advance in the "early, massive and immediate detection of the group most vulnerable to suffering from these serious diseases, which are growing exponentially and for whose eradication it is essential to prevent them from becoming chronic."
The technological part has been developed by the leading Aragonese company in virtual reality Imascono, and the content part, that is, the medical expertise, has been led by Dr. Ignacio Jaúregui, also from Aragon and who, as a psychiatrist, psychologist and nutritionist, is Author of numerous books and publications on TCA.
Along with him, there has been a large team of experts in this type of disorders, including specialist doctors from the Clinical Hospital and the Provincial Hospital of Zaragoza, Maite Zapata, Pedro Ruiz, César Paumar and Andrea Barrio.
The application deploys an interactive virtual space, whose main objective is that schoolchildren, through different gaming dynamics and under an environment of spontaneity - with adequate storytelling and avatar characters that recreate scenes from the daily lives of adolescents - can carry out the five steps of the SCOFF test, a scientific instrument for screening ED cases in school-aged adolescents, and which is currently 'passed' in writing with little return of cases.
This questionnaire responds to the acronym of the initials of the questions in each item in English: Inducing vomiting (sick), control over intake (control), weight loss (out weight), feeling fat (fat) and food dominates life (food).
Alert system
The program itself will self-correct the test and automatically generate an alert system that allows the implementation of help mechanisms for minors or adolescents who require it. The application will be 'multifunction', so that it can be operated from any device – mobile phone, tablet or computer – and anywhere, both in the schools themselves and at home.
The scientific validation of the tool will be carried out this year through a pilot project in two educational centers in the Autonomous Community and will be led by Dr. Pedro Ruiz Lázaro, head of the Clinic's Psychiatry service.
To guarantee its correct functioning from a clinical point of view, work groups will be formed in which the virtual tests will be carried out and also by the traditional method, as well as subsequent interviews, through which the reliability of the tool will be evaluated.
The objective is that its use can be generalized in all educational centers in Aragon in the 2024/2025 academic year. The APE Foundation has also initiated contacts with the Ministry of Education to try to subsequently make the leap to schools throughout the country.
In Aragon, and especially after COVID, there has been an exponential increase in the incidence of these problems, with more serious cases that have frequently required hospital admission.
The onset of this type of disorders has also been observed at younger ages (10 years). So far this year, 110 new cases have been assessed, according to data from the Eating Disorders Unit of the Lozano Blesa University Clinical Hospital.
Source: Europa press
