Paulin Jürjens: Learn to trust technology
A story of a regular course project that turned into an inspiring idea with a noble mission to help parents to bring up their kids happy and healthy
Paulin Jürjens is a practicing physiotherapist, Health Care Technology Master’s programme student and now also the CEO of the project. It is mainly the latter we were to talk about during our meeting on late Tuesday afternoon. Despite the fact, it is the end of a busy working day for her Paulin is full of energy and doesn’t stop smiling. She has hundreds of stories and urban myths around child health from her own practice and she knows for sure how to apply them best to make a difference for parents concerned with the development of their children. A tool to make that happen is .
So what is about? It is an application that helps parents monitor and guide their child’s development with family doctors on board. In charge of the project along with Paulin is a team of four students from Health Care Technology programme. Together they believe to have what it takes to make their project reality.
Before you read further, here is a bit of important information: Until May, 28 you have an opportunity to support Kidsmile project with your donation or by sharing the fundraising link with others.
How has the idea developed?
During the course Business and Entrepreneurship within our Master’s programme, we were divided into teams and encouraged to come up with a project to work on. In order to come up with a viable idea we have all shared our professional experience with each other. In my case, as a pediatric therapist I meet many parents every day. And all of them are very different — some are worried and insecure about every little detail in their kids upbringing, while others consider most of the things happening to their child normal or caused genetically. The truth is as always somewhere in the middle — while first could use some reliable source of reassurance, always available to them, the latter would find it important to learn that many abnormalities could be fixed if tackled at the right time with the right means.
Therefore, it only seemed logical to work on a tool that would provide parents with that kind of personalized information prepared for them by specialists in the field. We have further refined the concept and decided to focus on two sides — physiotherapy and speech therapy.
Specialized in the physical development of children I can see many examples where simple tips and exercises applied at certain developmental stages can help to prevent undesired complications later on. And the same applies to speech disorders. Thus, the way parents communicate with their children at earlier stages of their development will have an effect later in a life of a child. There are many connections between different processes that we can see, and we would like to share our advice with the parents on how to approach them.
When it comes to the name Kidsmile, it refers to milestones in development of a child. Thus, the slogan we use is “track your child’s milestones”. We had another name on mind — “Babysteps”, which we really liked but had to let go of, since we do not only focus on babies.
We became more and more excited about Kidsmile application idea, and so, what was created from a necessity to meet course requirements turned into our passion and dream.
Why is it important?
In Estonia there is of course a system for General practitioners (GPs) to refer children with disorders to a corresponding therapy. Nevertheless, the fund itself is very limited and the decision on granting a referral to a child merely depends on GP’s opinion. Sometimes parents express their worry that something is wrong with their child, which doesn’t coincide with the conclusions of their GP.
Our goal is to provide parents with the reassurance, with the certainty that their child is doing okay, or with a strong advice to seek the help of a specialist. In the first year of life, there are 10 obligatory appointments with a GP or a GP nurse for a child in Estonia, for which they use guidelines that have been compiled by a large number of different specialists but for instance, a physiotherapist is missing from the group. This means that the motor assessment might not be too thorough and the GP might miss some small discrepancies in the child’s development that could easily be corrected, if addressed immediately.
If people do not get enough information from their GP, they will ask their friends or parents or will turn to the Internet to find the answers. The problem with the information obtained this way is that it is not evidence-based and often unreliable, which may cause false conclusions and panic as a result. Parents also tend to compare their children, forgetting that what is okay for one child is not necessary okay for the other. For instance, they may compare the age when their children started walking, forgetting that one may have started crawling earlier than the other, which in turn has influenced further developmental patterns. For us it is important to provide parents with the verified information in a practical format and make them feel more secure with the upbringing of their children.
People behind the project
In our team we are five people and we have known each other for about a year by now. We all have a full-time job, we study at the university, and now we are also busy with the Kidsmile project. During the lockdown period, we had to organise all our communication in the online format. It worked out really good, but I must admit all our Zoom and Skype meetings are very serious and work-related, there is no time for too much fun at the moment. Now we have more or less defined roles, but in the beginning we were all struggling with who had to do what, what workload was fair and so on. Now we are getting there and what is important we are a great team and without support and knowledge of each other we would have never been able to make it happening.
So here we are:
Paulin Jürjens, Chief Executive Officer
We have decided I will be a Kidsmile’s CEO for various reasons. Most importantly, it was my idea and I am kind of a visionary of it. Besides, I have the insights from the parents and I am the only one of us, who has experience working particularly with children, hence I think I know this field the best and can trust my gut feeling. I really see the need for Kidsmile application and it is something I really want to do. Maybe that is the reason I am the one, who is also pushing things a bit, but I am always trying to be democratic and ask everyone’s opinions. Each of us has their own freedom. I appreciate my team enormously and I feel really lucky to work together with them.
I already have my Master’s in Physiotherapy, this is something I already do professionally and can continue doing in the future. But the truth is I didn’t want to be stuck in my niche, but to constantly broaden my mind and to see what is out there in the health care sector. Therefore, Health Care Technology Master’s programme with its insights to IT, financial, political and managerial sides of health care proved to be a perfect match for me. I have an opportunity to use my experience working with kids, but now in a completely different dimension. Before my second Master’s I could never imagine I would be able to work on the application together with a wonderful team of like-minded specialists.
Anneli Lebert, Chief Product Officer
Anneli has a Bachelor’s degree in Physiotherapy from the University of Tartu and is currently working as a Lead Therapist in the Ambulatory Department at North Estonia Medical Center. She decided to enroll to Health Care Technology programme to broaden her horizons in Health Care field and to expand her scope of practice. In Kidsmile Anneli is working on detecting and describing the functionalities and characteristics of the application. Anneli is the one who always digs deep and finds some important information for the project. She is not afraid of challenges, in fact she is actively looking for them, because she knows it is challenge, what drives the development.
Jorge Rodríguez, Chief Marketing Officer
Jorge will be the person in charge of the marketing and design part of Kidsmile. The reason for this is that, apart from being a physiotherapist with over 10 years of experience, Jorge has been running his own online platform to promote physiotherapy among patients, for around 4 years. Social media management, content creation (articles and visuals) and development of marketing campaigns have been some of his tasks for years. He decided to study Health Care Technology to acquire knowledge about entrepreneurship, change management and how different IT solutions interact with each other, to use it as a tool to empower patients and promote self-management.
Johannes Horm, Lead Developer
Johannes joined Kidsmile project a little bit later than others.He is friends with Anneli Lebert, who asked him to join the project to contribute to it with his technical knowledge and experience. Being a second-year Business and IT Master’s student in Taltech and having worked in Nortal in different roles (developer, project manager, community leading and etc) over 4 years, Johannes thought that it would be interesting to try something different. So far his role has been mostly about prototyping, setting up the homepage kidsmile.ee, potential technical architecture/roadmap. But most importantly, Johannes is looking for solutions to open up a closed ecosystem of Kidsmile project and the current Estonian e-health system. Johannes is very inspired with his work in Kidsmile and is planning to use it for his Master’s thesis.
Paule Hermet, Chief Communications Officer
Paule is working in biotechnology branch for Icosagen company and is going to study biomedicine at the University of Tartu. Because Paule studied food technology at her Bachelor’s if we consider expanding our topics later on she could be also our in-house nutritionist.
Awards and Current Fundraising
With Kidsmile we already won Digital Health Hackathon 2019, and as a prize we were accepted to the Connected Health Cluster and received the mentorship from Piret Hirv, who has motivated us a lot and helped with her great connections. The whole course was very helpful, and we have got so many good ideas, support and the direction for further development.
Later, Health Care Technology professors and mentors encouraged us to enter Prototron platform, and we were lucky to be accepted and thus introduced into the world of start-ups and incubators. The whole thing is very new for us and we had many courses on various topics, among which teamwork, leadership, writing one-pagers.
Until May 28th we are fundraising on Prototron platform to start working on Kidsmile project.
Plans for future
A very bold and ambitious idea for future is to have our application integrated with the database used by general practitioners in Estonia. It would allow GPs to have access to the information and skills checklists of every child from our platform. The thing is that the time GPs can dedicate to each child is very limited, and this is the reason why they can only focus on the major issues and indicators. Besides, they only see the state of the child’s health at the moment the appointment takes place, thus missing the whole developmental dynamic the parents are witnessing. This may create a barrier between parents and GPs, when parents don’t know where to seek help in case they feel they child is developing with a disorder. They may not know when it is necessary to go to the speech therapist, and when to allow the time for a child to develop a new skill.
At certain stage, we may consider entering German market, since there the practice of prescribing preventative applications already exists, and so there is a specific framework of how to become one of such applications. This would be one of the ways to develop internationally later on.
We are definitely planning to launch the pilot in Estonia. Currently, we need to finish our prototype and then to actually start testing it with real people to implement further features from there on.
I am so passionate about our project I could talk about it non-stop! So far, we keep receiving a very positive feedback and we truly believe our project has the future. People should learn to trust technology, especially when backed up by medical specialists.
Practical tips for parents from Paulin
- Carry your child with both hands, not with one hand only. It is very important for symmetrical development of your child, but also for your own arm muscles. Especially once your child will start growing and putting on weight. You do not want to turn out lopsided.
- When you put child to bed — rotate the side they sleep on every night. A child will naturally look in the direction where the parent stands. Rotation will stimulate the equal development of both sides.
- Tummy time is really important for the development of the child since the very beginning. The child should be put on their tummy every time he or she is awake. They need to start working against gravity and work out their muscles this way.
Would you like to support Kidsmile project? You have an opportunity to do so until May 28 using the link for donations here. Or simply share this story with your friends or colleagues!
Originally published at https://medium.com on May 25, 2020.
