January 08, 2026
4 min read
Key takeaways:
- Between 50% to 75% of children struggle with adhering to health care regimens.
- Rebecca Liu, a senior at UCLA, described her idea for a game that could educate children about their health and improve adherence.
SAN DIEGO — Most children report struggling with health care tasks like monitoring blood glucose and bolusing insulin, but what if an app could help with that?
In a presentation at AIMed, Rebecca Liu, a senior studying psychobiology at University of California Los Angeles, described her idea for an app called HeroHealth that would gamify health care tasks for children with chronic illnesses like diabetes and food allergies.
“The idea was shaped by my enriching experience this past summer in the Children’s Hospital of Orange County’s Medical Intelligence and Innovation Institute (CHOC Mi4) internship, where I explored equitable pediatric innovation through lectures in AI, nanomedicine, genomics and health care design, as well as team-based innovation challenges,” Liu, who is entering medical school in 2026, told Healio. “These experiences showed me how technology with human-centered design thinking — thoughtfully developed alongside clinicians and families — can meaningfully improve pediatric care.”
The app does not exist yet, but Liu said she is actively researching and refining her idea with the hope of making it a reality. Healio spoke Liu with about her inspiration for HeroHealth and what her next steps will be.
Healio: What inspired HeroHealth? What gap was it meant to fill?
Liu: HeroHealth was inspired by a recurring pattern I observed across both clinical and community settings. Although children with chronic illnesses are often taught what to do, they may not be fully supported in how to live with their care every day, especially with different backgrounds, family circumstances and socioeconomic factors.
While shadowing a pediatric endocrinologist through the CHOC Mi4 program — where I rotated across various fields like allergy, neurology, NICU, pediatric ICU, ED and operating room — I saw several cases in which children struggled to consistently bolus insulin or monitor their blood glucose, leading to dangerously high levels. Research echoes this reality, showing that up to 50% to 75% of pediatric patients struggle with adherence, even for short-term regimens.
Through mentoring at-risk middle-school students with Los Angeles Team Mentoring, I saw how deeply social isolation, anxiety and lack of peer support can also shape a child’s confidence and engagement.
Traditional education tools, such as pamphlets, handouts and videos, rarely meet children where they naturally learn and connect, which is through imaginative play. Inspired by my childhood multiplayer worlds like Club Penguin, and by real clinical experiences across hospitals, I envisioned HeroHealth as a space where learning to care for health feels like an engaging adventure and important responsibility — like a mission.
HeroHealth aims to fill this gap — lack of adherence, isolation and inequities with social determinants — by transforming self-care education into an immersive, imaginative and socially supportive experience, helping all children not only understand their care, but feel empowered and less alone while managing it.
Healio: How does HeroHealth compare with existing tools?
Liu: Most current pediatric education tools focus on information delivery, such as pamphlets, discharge instructions or videos intended for caregivers to reinforce at home. While important, these approaches are often passive and difficult for children to internalize for the long-term. Back to shadowing in the pediatric endocrinology clinic, I noticed that adherence often depended on finding the right balance of caregiver support. Overly rigid supervision could cause children’s frustration and resistance, while too little guidance sometimes resulted in children disengaging from essential routines such as insulin bolusing.
HeroHealth takes a fundamentally different approach. It uses a generative AI to personalize each child’s learning journey, dynamically adapting content, dialogue, and challenge level to the child’s medical condition, developmental stage, cultural background and learning style. All educational content is to be built from clinician-approved templates and real care plans, ensuring medical accuracy while maintaining creativity and emotional engagement.
Rather than simply explaining a task, HeroHealth embeds self-care behaviors into these gamified, interactive quests. This means turning carb counting, inhaler use or allergen awareness into actions that children practice repeatedly. Pairing education with story, play and peer connection, the platform is designed to support sustained engagement in a way that existing traditional tools often cannot.
Healio: What are your next steps?
Liu: The next step is continued interdisciplinary collaboration to refine both the clinical and technical foundations of HeroHealth. This includes ongoing conversations with pediatricians, psychologists, patients and families to ensure the platform is developmentally appropriate, ethical and useful clinically. In medical school, this may look like talking with patients and families on their experiences with medical adherence and current patient education.
On the technical side, future work will explore AI models that balance personalization with safety, as well as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-compatible architecture to support integration with hospital systems. Transformer-based generative AI models, for example, are exciting to look into. They can evolve a “digital twin” of a child’s medical profile. Other ideas that come to mind are unlocking tailored quests via discharge QR codes to reinforce home care. Accessibility tools are essential, with features like text-to-speech, multilingual support, contrast modes, and moderated peer spaces to promote inclusion and safe connection.
Additional features under exploration include augmented-reality tools, such as scanning nutrition labels to identify allergens, which can further bridge digital learning with real-world behavior. Ultimately, the goal is to rigorously evaluate HeroHealth’s impact on patients’ engagement, adherence and psychosocial well-being through studies before its broader implementation.
For more information:
Rebecca Liu can be reached through Gemma Lovegrove at gemma@ai-med.io.
Sources/Disclosures
Source:
Liu R. HeroHealth: Every child the hero of their health story. Presented at: AIMed; Nov. 9-12, 2025; San Diego.
Disclosures:
Liu reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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