YEAH! Youth hEAlth from a Holistic perspective

"YEAH! will develop an innovative co-created intervention using digital solutions to promote social interactions that empower children and adolescents to make lifestyle choices that benefit their health and well-being. The intervention ambitions to be simultaneously personalised to the individual user and reach a large part of the EUropean children and adolescent populaiton large-scale in scope. Objectives are to develop:
(1) A holistic person-centred intervention that:
● targets multiple actors (peers, parents, teachers, healthcare professionals, extra-curricular educators) in a coordinated manner, by training them to adopt an interpersonal style that empowers children and adolescents and develop their psychosocial skills and health literacy.
● targets multiple health behaviours simultaneously, based on the 24-hour movement approach (Tremblay, 2020) that emphasizes increased physical activity and sleep, and reduced sedentary behaviour and screen time.
(2) A co-created personalised intervention that is:
● tailored to children and adolescents from different age groups, by targeting two periods during which healthy lifestyle choices are crucial: childhood (8-10 years), an age at which 29% of European children already live with overweight and obesity (WHO, 2022a), and adolescence (14-16 years), an age at which 50% of mental health problems are established (Kessler et al., 2005).
● adapted to children and adolescents from diverse contexts, including vulnerable ones, in terms of socio-economic and socio-spatial conditions, gender and health. To do so in a realistically manner, theory and evidence-based identification of the intervention features that are effective in all children and adolescents will be tailored to each context, using a robust, evidence-based and systematic based on co-creation process involving end-users and stakeholders and empirical optimisation.
● dynamically tailored during the intervention period based on the monitoring of children and adolescents’ health behaviours and health outcomes.
(3) A large-scale and equitable interventio n that relies on privacy-preserving digital solutions that are:
● effective for all, by considering digital literacy and risk of addiction in the development of the digital features, which will be designed to promote real-life social interactions that are empowering.
● available for all, by using widely accessible digital tools (e.g., smartphones), and by developing an open-access and open-source digital solution that can be realistically used and further developed after the end of the project by other end-users, stakeholders and researchers."