Is community-based and participatory health care sufficient?
The World Health Organization (2003) states that “Effective treatment for chronic conditions requires […] a system that is proactive and emphasizes health throughout a lifetime.”
For us, three conditions are required to “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” by 2030, a United Nations Global Goal:
- Health innovation should be driven by communities and validated with participatory research.
- It should focus on prevention and adherence to care, not on expensive tech.
- Processes should be transparently documented, and results should be freely available to ensure everyone can use and adapt the work done.
Do you agree? Would you see other essentials?
Watch the practice we develop at Breathing Games. 
Hard to disagree!
Hello @breathinggames , it’s hard to disagree. Elsewhere in the project we have documented that a shift happens when the care-receiver is also the payer: suddenly, prevention becomes far and away the best way to spend your money (and time) on care. This is rare, because the person receiving care is almost never the person who pays for the care: the payer is either the state (more in Europe) or insurers (more in the USA). This is associated with an attention to therapy and a de-prioritisation of prevention.
I looked brefly at your games. It seems the first three are about teaching people with respiratory conditions what to do or not do, whereas the fourth is a quantified self kind of thing, right? Also, in the fourth game you need dedicated hardware to measure air pressure. How is it done? Do you make your own, with Arduinos etc?
Payment and games
Thanks @Alberto for your message.
Mh, in fact both state and insurers are paid by citizens, but the solutions set rarely preserve the collective interest. :-/ Same happens when organizations or institutions are subsidized by public funds, but result in non-adaptable innovation…
Regarding the four video, the first is preventive and for all (coping with stress), the second is aimed at education in asthma, the third is based on a therapy for CF, and the last builds on a lung capacity test recognized for a follow up of certain respiratory conditions. For the two last, we develop open-source hardware to capture pressure and flow, using Arduino or Raspberry Pi. One additional layer is that these technologies are collectively created, which enables to increase awareness about respiratory health.
It would be great to see the prototype!
It sounds like interesting work, a some people around here (like @Costantino , @Rune and @Alexander_Shumsky ) are into making for health, and will surely be curious about your device.
As for payer vs. receiver: yes, in the end citizens always foot the bill. But the risk-sharing mechanism we have in place makes it so that, you do not have to pay for your own treatment. You are paying a little of everyone’s treatment. This encourages a behaviour economists call moral hazard: if I do not diet and neglect my exercise hard, everyone else has to pay for my heart surgery: no additional cost for me (except the illness itself, of course). Conversely, if I do adopt a very healthy lifestyle, I still have to pay for my health insurance, just like the guy who eats McDonald’s twice a day every day. The Amish, for example, refuse to take health insurance on the ground that it deresponsabilises people, and they do behave quite differently when it comes to prevention.
Behaviours
Thank you for the connections. I did not know about this theory and read about it and the practice, it is interesting!
We are continuing to develop them to do clinical tests in November.
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