An app that improves communication between parents and children with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis ("JIA"), and provides a platform to help children overcome physical and psychological challenges associated with JIA.

• Osman Hafeez
• Yeliz Ali
• Kashif Pirzada
• Karim Mithani
• Sana Hanif
• William Alagaratnam
• Ian Duke

Every 3 out of 1000 children in Canada suffer from JIA. Children with JIA often cannot understand why they are feeling a certain way or articulate symptoms to their parents and physicians. Moreover, their treatment is largely dependent on the information provided by the parents, instead of coming first hand from the patients. Additionally, parents have difficulty educating their kids on JIA, thereby making their treatment even more challenging. Children with JIA also suffer from depression, isolation, loss of vision among many other problems leading to immense emotional issues. Due to these problems, parents with children suffering from JIA are reported to experience work loss 2.78x more than their counterparts.

Joint Space enables communication between parents and children with JIA. Our interactive app collects information on symptoms, issues and treatment in a fun way. It provides a platform to help parents educate kids through the use of stories and videos. Joint Space aims to create a positive and encouraging learning environment for children with JIA. Empowering them is our main objective. As they navigate through the app, they are learning, getting empowered and behind the scenes, we are collecting data! This information is then presented in two views: one for the parents and the other for the child.

In order to improve treatment adherence, Joint Space offers a positive reinforcement reward program, and longitudinally tracks psychosocial symptoms to help parents and health-care providers quantify the effectiveness of various interventions. The “Hooray” feature provides children with community support and to let them know that they are not alone.

The app has been designed so that it can easily be replicated for any pediatric disease. To scale this venture, we explored varying institutionally backed revenue sources.