How can we reduce health differences using data?
Life expectancy can be extremely different based on the neighborhood someone grows up in. In s'Hertogenbosch, which is a city in the Netherlands, a challenge was posed by the municipality to find a way to reduce these differences.
Here you can see two regions that are extremely close to each other, meanwhile there is a life expectancy difference of more than 9 years
After a literature review, and asking professionals, we came to the conclusion that there were three subproblems that had to be considered.
Healthy people tend to improve their health even further, whilst already unhealthy people care less about this problem.
Therefore
The problem arises that the target group might necessarily want to take steps to improve their health.
Furthermore
Some people in the unhealthy regions might not have the funds to afford to be healthy
Lastly
How can municipalities get more insight into health related intervention strategies
We came up with the following solution to tackle these problems:
We propose a Health Lynx App that uses the information about your neighborhood to determine which health categories should be improved. We have found four major categories that could tackled using this app.
These categories give daily challenges for the user that encourage them to live more healthy!
The user can receive fishes as currency whenever they complete these simple tasks.
These fishes can be spend in a shop to receive discounts on healthy products. This would be in collaboration with local shops or enterprises.
Another way to earn these fishes is by challenging your friends to do health related activities, or by attending local health events.
Lastly, anonymized data will be collected through the use of the app, that will be shared with the municipality. This data will be visible on a Health equality dashboard.
We have created this idea in the 5th edition Data Hackathon, The Healthy Brabanthine City. Which was hosted at JADS in s'Hertogenbosch, as part of the Data Week NL. Besides the proposed ideation, we have created a Minimal Working Prototype of the app, as well as of the dashboard. The entire project was done within 24 hours, and we managed to win the event.