The Principal Investigator Initiative (PII) is a new initiative by the Botnar Research Centre for Child Health (BRCCH), a joint research centre by the University of Basel and ETH Zürich. The Principal Investigator Initiative has the goal of driving interdisciplinary research into critical challenges in global paediatric health and medicine. Within this initiative six research projects have been granted funding with up to 1 million CHF for a duration of four years.

We are pleased to announce that Prof. Dr. Elgar Fleisch and Dr. Filipe Barata from our centre are key researchers in one of the selected projects!

The “Alex: Design, Development and Evaluation of a Digital Health Assistant for Paediatric Asthma” project “aims to improve asthma control in adolescents using a smartphone-based digital health assistant designed for regular and sustained remote disease monitoring and patient coaching. They will also harness digital and AI-based approaches to assess a patient’s health state passively, i.e., minimising the patient’s burden in the process of disease monitoring. Finally, the consortium will assess the feasibility and scalability of the digital health assistant in the socio-economic setting characteristic of low-to-middle income countries.”

The team members are: Adjunct Prof Edgar Delgado-Eckert (University Children’s Hospital Basel and Department of Biomedical Engineering at University of Basel), Prof Elgar Fleisch (Centre for Digital Health Interventions at ETH Zürich), Prof Urs Frey (University Children’s Hospital Basel), Dr Filipe Barata (Centre for Digital Health Interventions at ETH Zürich), Prof Nicole Probst-Hensch (Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute), Prof Sorin Man (Emergency Clinical Hospital for Children, Romania).

We would like to wish Prof. Edgar Delgado-Eckert and his team all the best for studying the management of asthma in adolescents with remote monitoring and coaching!

Learn more about the The Principal Investigator Initiative (PII): https://brc.ch/six-projects-selected-for-principal-investigator-initiative/

Learn more about Dr. Barata’s ADAMMA Research Core: https://adamma-cdhi-eth-zurich.github.io/