WHAAM: a free revolutionary mobile phone application for children with ADHD
By Dr Georgios Efthimiou, molecular biologist – geneticist PhD
In June, Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (AUTh) developed WHAAM (Web Health Application for ADHD Monitoring), in collaboration with four other European universities. WHAAM is a very useful application for mobile phones and other portable devices that will make diagnosis, treatment and monitoring of children with ADHD (by experts, parents and teachers) much easier.
The Greek research team was led by Dr Panayiotis Bamidis, Assistant Professor in Computing and Medical Education at AUTh. The project was funded by the EU program ‘Lifelong Learning’.
This application is free and it can be downloaded from the program’s website at: https://app.whaamproject.eu/gr/index.phpor from Apple App Store & Android Google Play. Τhe website has guidelines about how parents or teachers can use this application, while WHAAM’s designers recommend to use it after consulting an expert child psychologist who is more familiar with the symptoms and the reactions of children with ADHD.
The user of this application can construct a network for each child in 6 simple steps. Observations of problematic behaviors can be recorded, facilitating a better understanding of the symptoms and the design of interventions that could help resolving various problems. The user can also log what happened before and what followed a problematic behavior. This way, the cause of this problem could be avoided in the future.
The application can also provide numerical and statistical data, something that can help the expert to evaluate the effectiveness of the interventions.
Finally, the user can register to a network of users and the observation records for each child are saved to an international database. This information can be then exploited for statistical studies about ADHD.
With this novel application, parents, teachers and experts can take better care of children with ADHD, making their lives easier!
SOURCES:
WHAAM: Web Health Application for Adhd Monitoring Project. http://www.whaamproject.eu/
Laboratory of Medical Physics AUTh: http://medphys.med.auth.gr/
Skourogianni R. (2015), MEDsin.gr,
