Children's Healthy Home Environment (CHHE) App
Citation:
Tulve, N., E. Sullivan, P. Ward, E. Hubal, AND M. Breen. Children's Healthy Home Environment (CHHE) App. R2 Children's Health Month Webinar Series, Virtual, NC, October 06, 2021.
Impact/Purpose:
This research proposes an innovative and creative way to help the Region meet the objectives of the Regional Children’s Health Strategy and the federal lead action plan. The Children’s Healthy Home Environment (CHHE) app will build capacity for federal and state/local partners in addressing children’s environmental health issues, thereby increasing the number of children protected from potential environmental hazards in the home environment. This project has wide applicability to all regions and programs within EPA and other federal agencies that conduct children’s environmental health activities.
Description:
• Mobile app concept: Current tools used by professionals who provide home visit services to families (e.g., environmental health practitioners, health educators, community health workers) are cumbersome and limited in scope. These tools provide information focused on one health concern, require manual collection of information (paper forms), and create time lags between the visit and follow-up recommendations for parents/caregivers. These professionals and their clients will benefit from a tool that can be tailored to enable efficient and broad evaluation of the home environment and provide targeted actions to improve children’s health. • Functionality: To address these limitations, a team of EPA scientists proposes development of the Children’s Healthy Home Environment App (CHHE App), an iPhone and android application that provides tailored evaluation, and topic-specific information and actions to improve the quality of the home environment and support child health. To do this, the app will collect location information and combine with information from selected child/parent/caregiver demographics and home characteristics and provide tips and actions categorized by location, exposure, and health. • Content: The CHHE App provides a mobile platform to use input information on characteristics of the child and the home. Tailored content can then be accessed through user-friendly icons based on geographic location, location in the home, exposure of concern, or child health. Initial construction of the app will include information on healthy home maintenance, safe product use, food preparation and cleaning practices. • Features: The CHHE App has several key innovative features, including: • Ability to select child-specific demographics, habits and practices, and housing characteristics to effectively tailor health promoting information and recommended actions. • Ability to capture, but not store, geographic location to tailor health promoting information and recommended actions based on geographic location. • Supports access to content from three perspectives: location in the home environment, exposure agent, or health. • Tiered access to information including top 10 tips as well as links to more detailed information to enable use by both home visit professionals and parents/caregivers. • Provides tailored, topic-specific recommendations and prioritized actions that home-visit professionals can leave with the parent/caregiver to support child health. • Platform that can be extended to include additional categories of exposures and health as needs and resources arise.