Area: Health Sciences

PI: Nieto Luna, Rubén

Research group: eHealth Lab

Project status: Closed

Funding institution: Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad - España

Dates: 2014-2016

Objectives: Chronic, recurrent pain is a major problem for our society and its treatment is challenging. It affects all stages of life and has a significant economic, social and personal impact. In children, who are the target of our proposal, one of the most common pain problems is recurrent abdominal pain (RAP, or DAR, in Catalan). It can affect up to 12% of the child population, impairing the daily lives of both the children themselves and their families. RAP is associated with other health problems and can be related with problems in adulthood.

The current system can offer no effective treatment for these children and their families. Consequently, we propose our online intervention, DARWeb, for people in this situation. DARWeb provides an innovative solution, as it offers a distance intervention, using ICTs to facilitate access. It is also innovative because the programme targets secondary prevention, when most of the treatments currently available for pain problems focus on reducing impact when the pain problems are already severe.

Thus, the goal is to provide information and teach strategies to the children and their parents that may help them cope with the pain and reduce its impact on their lives in the short, medium and long term.