Rambam: A new app will help children deal with leukemia 

The application that will help children with cancer cope with hospitalization: Rambam Medical Center has developed a new application called TaDam that helps through tasks and meeting characters to succeed in the journey of treatments and recovery.

Leukemia is a rare disease but is the most common type of cancer among children. The disease erupts violently and the diagnosis itself causes the child or adolescent being treated and his parents, along with all the circles close to him, to be flooded with information along with emotional flooding. Already on the day of the diagnosis, the young patient enters the hospital and a treatment protocol is formulated. 

"The huge amounts of information, together with the accompanying shock from the moment of receiving the news, causes parents, and sometimes also their children, difficulty in internalizing everything they are going to face at that moment" explains Dr. Nira Arad, director of the pediatric leukemia service and deputy director of the hemato-oncology department , at the Ruth Children's Hospital in Rambam, and thus developed the idea for the app: "We recognized the difficulty of containing this load of information at such a critical and complex time for the family, and we thought of a personalized solution for each young patient whose lives changed in one day The idea for the TaDam app was born - Ta-Dam!

The app's characterization process was done with Daniela Rasielski, an entrepreneur and technology innovation consultant, and Moshe Yaakov, who turned the vision into a practical app. The care team of the department presented the developers with the challenges: Differences in the type and stages of treatment between the patients, different age groups, the need for flexibility and the implementation of changes throughout the treatment in light of the treatment reactions and more. The idea is to involve the young patients and their parents in the medical process, to increase the feeling of clarity, certainty and activity in the process by providing personalized information adapted to the therapeutic phase.

Immediately after registering for the application, the patient enters a world of content adapted to his age group, a world designed as an action game in which he can roam, accumulate points, perform tasks, answer puzzles and challenges and move between stages.

For example, in some of the stations in the game, the users answer puzzles and challenges designed as psychotechnical tests, the winning and completion of which moves the patient to a new stage in the game. The design and conceptual language is reminiscent of popular action games, in which the user must accumulate points and coins and receive virtual rewards. In the case of the "TaDam" applet, additional layers of information have been added through which the user gets to know the "avatars" of the doctors treating the department, view explanatory content about the disease, the medical equipment, the hospital and the area of the disease alongside routine technical guides for actions that the patient must take such as mouth rinses or dressing changes . 

The children's parents are also partners in the operation of the application: Upon receiving the diagnosis and at the end of each medical stage, the parents receive the treatment protocol for the coming month, and only after scanning the new protocol into the application, a new space opens up to the young patient, revealing a new world of content along with a predictable schedule for the following treatments. Among other things, you can find practical instructional content through videos of the staff in the department, such as how to take medicines and dosage, and essential information about them.

"The 'Ta-Dam' application is actually the natural development in the field of doctor-patient communication and is a unique model of its kind in Israel," said Dr. Shifra Ash, director of the pediatric hemato-oncology department, where the application will start operating for the first time. "Using it allows knowledge to be transferred to the patient and his family in a more optimal way, helps relieve pressures that originate from uncertainty, helps the patient gain control over the process and harness it in order to obtain better collaborations."

"In the future, the application may include a wider range of personal services, starting with connection to forms, a chat with the attending physician, a portal for exercising social rights, improved connectivity to online games to play with patients of their age hospitalized in the ward, and connection to the hospital's computer systems. The development capabilities of the application are many and this A spectacular world of content is now also accessible to our patients, with the ability to adapt the application in the future to innovations yet to come."