Youth health from a holistic perspective – YEAH

Empowering children and adolescents to adopt healthy lifestyles while tackling health inequalities is crucial. Person-centred interventions have been developed to this end but face several challenges: they are often restricted to one specific actor of children’s environment (e.g., teachers) and neglect other actors who may play a pivotal role in their health behaviours (e.g., peers and parents), they are often restricted to one specific behaviour (e.g., physical activity) or life domain (e.g., school), their effectiveness may differ according to socio-economic or socio-spatial conditions, and they are rarely dynamically adapted to the evolution of persons' needs during the program. To address these challenges, and in line with the call, the ambition of YEAH! is to develop an innovative personalised person-centred digital intervention that: (1) promotes children (8-10 years) and adolescents’ (14-16 years) social interactions with multiple actors of their environment, (2) targets multiple health behaviours (physical activity, sedentary behaviours, diet, sleep), (3) combines in a novel manner evidence-based knowledge of optimal intervention features (top-down approach), with co-creation with end-users and stakeholders (bottom-up approach) to tailor the intervention prototype to the local context, and (4) relies on a state-of-the-art method of intervention development to rigorously measure and verify its impact, optimise its sustainable implementation in the community and its equity, and evaluate its cost-effectiveness. To do so, YEAH! will be based on an interdisciplinary articulation of methods and concepts from psychology (health, social, developmental), public health, psychiatry, social marketing, geography, geomatics, environmental epidemiology, IT and computer sciences, statistics, physiology, and medicine, and on the participation of stakeholders (children and adolescents, parents, teachers, healthcare professionals, educators, local and national authorities).