The WHAAM application: An evidence-based application to support behavioural interventions.

Objectives: This poster illustrates the new WHAAM application (WA), a software developed by the EU-funded WHAAM project (Chifari et al., 2013), designed to improve communication between health professionals, teachers and the parents of children with ADHD. It also provides them with an evidence-based set of results to evaluate the efficacy of targeted behavioural treatments. Design and Methods: As in popular social networks such as Facebook, WA users can create a virtual network of people who are directly involved in the care of a child with ADHD. The WA includes the ability to create and securely monitor a range of different behavioural contexts and to share a common set of data about the child. This will help to improve the quality of communication between families, education and health services. Moreover, the WA supports health professionals to plan targeted behavioural interventions aimed at reducing or eliminating inappropriate behaviours. By identifying patterns in the antecedent and/or consequent events that are functionally related to the targeted behaviours the professionals can organise the childâEUR(TM)s network to gather quantitative (frequency/duration) and qualitative data (ABC charts) in the specific places that they occur. Using this data they will be able to understand the function of the behaviour and to propose appropriate behaviour modification strategies. Finally, the WA calculates the Parker (2011) TAU-U statistical index in order to estimate the effect size of a treatment on the behaviours occurrences. The WA consists of a web application for accessing data, to plan/evaluate interventions and a mobile app focused on data collection. Results: The WA is currently under test in Italy, United Kingdom, and Portugal. Conclusions: The WA could have a strong impact on the ADHD behavioural managements process, supporting positive active cooperation between the caregivers of children with ADHD, promoting evidence-based behavioural interventions and improving knowledge about common antecedents and consequences related to specific clusters of behaviours.