sGuide: A leading-edge sex education intervention
| Host Organisation: | T.R.I Technologos Research and Innovation Services Ltd |
| Project Budget: | 117.500,44 € |
| IDEK Funding: | 99.875,00 € |
The spread of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) is one of the biggest societal challenges that humanity still faces. Global STIs testing market is expected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 8.61% during the period 2018-2022. The implications of risky sexual behaviour are hard for people to understand, because this behaviour takes place in a complicated network of interacting people; this is one of the main reasons that current interventions fail to achieve the expected health-behaviour outcome. A sex education intervention should therefore be tailored to the user’s needs, be engaging and immersive, in order to drive behavioural change in the area of STI transmission, rather than simply provide basic information on STIs. This is the purpose of sGuide, a leading-edge sex education platform, which aims to revolutionise the sex education market by not only contributing to STIs reduction, but also reducing the Cypriot, European and International budget spent for health services. It will be a big step toward the design of tailored and relevant sex education interventions that will promote active learning, rather than passive one-way learning. sGuide will provide innovative, interactive methods for visualizing complex information via agent-based simulations, serious games for infection transmission in specific populations accompanied with machine learning models for personalised counselling and accurate STI risk estimations. The project team consists of experts in sexual health, education, interactive technologies, digital interventions, business and start up development, exploitation and ethics, incorporating expertise needed to introduce a personalised behavioural change platform to the market. The project coordinator has significant technical and business development experience from other startups development, as well as extensive EU projects knowledge transfer to commercial companies. This will ensure the viability and prosperity of TRIS ‘s project idea as a startup venture.