La Collina degli Elfi (EN)

La Collina degli Elfi (‘The Hill of Elves’) is a non-profit Voluntary Association established in 2008 in Govone, Italy which aims to organise and run a psycho-physical recovery centre for children in remission from cancer illnesses and their families. La Collina hosts families with children and young people, aged 4 to 17, suffering from cancer who have been out of treatment for no more than a year or who are in maintenance therapy.

La Collina degli Elfi works in the belief that when a child falls ill, the whole family falls ill. For this reason, the Association acts as a springboard for families with children and young people in remission from cancer. Through its well-established and scientifically validated experience, it offers a path of psycho-physical recovery in the Piedmontese hills with the aim of allowing each individual guest to regenerate, to live with serenity the return to normality, in the delicate transition towards a new everyday life together. La Collina’s protected environment is one of its strengths, because it makes it possible to work on the entire family unit. 

The project of the Association is based on a model of integration of different disciplines and therapeutic practices aimed at psycho-physical recovery. The treatment offered is innovative in the way it is carried out: we propose opportunities and tools to the entire family unit to encourage and support the processing of the emotional experience related to the illness and reintegration into daily life. 

The project proposal consists of following the families for the entire year following the first week of their stay in the facility, proposing follow-ups in the following three and six months with structured and scheduled monitoring actions aimed at consolidating the results obtained. La Collina degli Elfi is the bearer of values such as raising awareness in the area of the problems associated with an oncological disease and spreading a culture oriented towards solidarity, attention to needs, gratuitousness and sharing. 

THE PROJECT

In order to enable even more incisive actions to support the child and his or her family, this project aims to develop an innovative app for accompaniment during hospitalisation. The aim is to offer a more effective and continuous rehabilitation pathway, promoting the psycho-physical well-being of children and their families, reducing isolation and strengthening the sense of community. 

The development of a dedicated app will offer innovative support to families still in hospital, helping them to manage the psychological impact of the disease and maintain a strong bond between family members. The app will indeed integrate virtual shared spaces, tools to support emotional well-being and interactive activities to reduce stress and feelings of isolation.

With the help of technology, tools will be sought to offer the child and his or her family to manage a changing relationship. For example, siblings can no longer play together as before, but with technology it is possible to create a tool that continues to bring them together remotely, giving value to their relationship, albeit in a different way.

The project is based on the evolution of the concept of gamification (first defined in 2010 at the DICE Summit) applied to medicine and, to be precise, to paediatric oncology. The term gamification, which has the word game as its root, indicates precisely the application of technologies designed for video games and so-called game design in contexts other than play. Beyond terminology, the approach used in non-virtual gaming is increasingly used in various contexts, where it can be useful to play down and make a challenging activity more engaging. 

Virtual language is particularly comprehensible to young patients and this is also why many of the gamification experiments have been conducted in paediatric wards. In paediatric oncology, video games are used as a tool to help children understand the reasons for the treatments they are undergoing. The results are encouraging: young patients gain more knowledge about the disease and awareness of the usefulness of the therapies, feeling more motivated to follow them. Gamification is also used as a tool for cognitive and neuromotor rehabilitation, which can also be performed at home. In general, rehabilitation for a wide variety of pathological conditions is among the most developing areas of application for gamification.

In 2020, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the US body responsible for the regulation of food and pharmaceutical products, issued a statement for the first time concerning a new project involving the application of a video game. The FDA has, in fact, approved the use of the first game-based digital therapeutic device, i.e. the first video game to be marketed and prescribed as a drug. The FDA states that the game is not intended as a substitute for more traditional therapies, but as an additional therapeutic tool.

OBJECTIVES

The development of the innovative app for accompaniment during hospitalisation is intended to:

• offer a more effective and continuous rehabilitation pathway.
• promote the psycho-physical well-being of children and their families.
• reduce isolation by strengthening the sense of community.

Specific Objectives:

• relieve stress during the hospitalisation of paediatric cancer patients, succeeding in transforming some of the stress into fun to be experienced with the parents as well.
• improve the child’s or young person’s mental image of the disease. This makes the treatments more acceptable to the young patients and increases empathy and collaboration between the child and the hospital staff.
• engage the child’s senses and attention away from the negative feelings of therapy.
• create a shared play space with siblings and parents to recreate domestic relations and strengthen bonds.
• develop tools for parents to manage anxiety, anger, frustration, helplessness.
• develop, through games, tools to support siblings in coping with the changes that often cause relational and behavioural problems by enabling them to transform negative feelings (anger, frustration, etc.) into positive stimuli.

The Collina’s methodology aims to transport children into a world where they can experience in a space created specifically to relax them and also to test their skills. These activities also involve parents and siblings who are able to interact with the virtual world, leading the children to be more serene and allowing the family to discover new ways of relating and new virtual spaces where they can play together, replacing care time with play time. Making therapy more acceptable, supporting siblings and offering support and decompression tools to parents represent the aim of the app realisation. In order to make it as performant and functional as possible, research will be carried out by administering a questionnaire to 150 sample families chosen from several paediatric hospitals, 50 doctors/therapists and 50 volunteers in order to define objectives, needs, functionality. The data will be processed and represented during a participatory workshop and then handed over to the developers of the concept note the perimeter of the app to be developed. A participatory planning process that will involve families, volunteers and professionals to develop a product as responsive as possible to real therapeutic and relational needs.