The Parenting for Lifelong Health Digital Ecosystem

Overview

Led by IDEMS International, this project lies at the core of our innovative approach to providing human-digital parenting programmes to all. 

Starting with the development of our human-digital hybrid programmes, ParentApp, ParentText and ParentChat, our Parenting for Lifelong Health Digital Ecosystem will provide accessible, open-source technologies for disseminating, monitoring, linking and sharing our programmes and research.


 

Our Development Goals

Building accessible, open-source and agile parenting support delivery technologies that are easily transported and contextualised to meet the needs of local implementing partners

Objectives

  • Continued development of existing ParentApp and ParentText. 
  • Development of new digital offerings including PerinatalApp, FacilitatorApp, and ParentApp for Kids.

Developing a cohesive human-digital ecosystem that links the PLH tools under one coherent system.

Centralised content management which enables experts to easily stay on top of and contribute to the expanding ecosystem.

  • Centralised PLH content repositories which enable content to be shared across programmes with the aim of structuring the content into data that can be reused across implementations, hence building consistency and best practices.
  • Ecosystem innovations which allow common components to be extracted and managed as part of the ecosystem, enabling reusability. This ensures the preservation of important components as the ecosystem evolves and improves.

Co-creating an adaptive and transferable digital architecture 

Supporting local innovation and enabling implementation partners to embrace adaptation.

  • Locally adaptive deployment repositories enable us to give control and ownership to partners, while preserving expert’s contributions.
  • Supporting grass-root innovation by empowering implementation partners to innovate based on local needs. The accessibility of our systems, paired with individual support from our software developers, ensures this adaptability.

Creating data systems for research, monitoring, evaluation and quality assurance

Ensuring the integrity and quality of PLH digital programmes through a data system which integrates the needs of our researchers, development partners and software developers.

  • Systems for research that support both qualitative and quantitative components of the research and enable the gathering of scientific evidence. 
  • Systems for development involve creating customisable dynamic dashboards to enable our implementation partners to track their impact in real time.
  • Systems for deployment which allow our software developers access to a high level of data precision as well as having the ability to mine the data for usage patterns to enable troubleshooting and optimisation. 

Developing and refining open tools to support technical assistance and monitoring quality assurance

Contributing to open projects as well as using them is what keeps the open community going and growing. 

  • Data tools. Developing an R library with specialist functions to integrate the data sources and analyses the project requires, open to members of the community.
  • Usability tools. Submitting current and future innovations developed for PLH Digital to open source systems such as RapidPro for use by the community, making building digital ecosystems more accessible.

 

Our Development Principles

  • Promoting Simplicity for actors to support inclusivity, enabling diverse contributors to build together.
  • Fostering Creativity to encourage local partners to adapt rather than adopt interventions.
  • Coherent Interoperability to ensure reusability of technical solutions and consistency of human experiences.
  • Embracing Complexity in systems to respond to real world situations and evidence based expert knowledge.
  • Encouraging Reusability by using open licenses and supporting contributions from partners with diverse expertise.
  • Building Capacity of local partners to co-build an open community developing the technologies.