BigaagARri

Project Details

Some of The ALIVE National Centre Team have been awarded the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Consumer-Led Research grant for the project: A Citizen Science Project to co-create 'BigaagARri' a Preventive Experiential, Arts, Cultural Evidence (PEACE) model for implementing at-scale in primary care and community.

PEACE leverages six exciting innovations in citizen science to co-create the new health knowledge essential for turning the tide in inequities of disease burden in Australia. The costs of these inequities are known, and they are socially and economically high. The impacts are most profound in priority populations where chronic diseases and intersecting issues of gender inequalities, family violence, mental ill-health, suicide, and ongoing trauma persist. Overall, too many life years have been and continue to be shortened. Current prevention approaches are not reaching people who need it most.

In Gumbaynggirr language, 'bigaagarri' means danger/threat to wellbeing. It signals to stay back and keep safe from this. This is a gifted word from one of our Aboriginal investigators to co-create preventive, experiential, arts based, cultural evidence models. To do this we will:

1. co-design virtual and augmented reality immersive media that work to address trauma, violence and social disconnection AND prevent downstream chronic diseases and the multitude of ill-health - using crowdsourcing and co-design;
2. co-create a holistic measurement framework to address current gaps in trauma-violence informed measures - led by people with lived-experience;
3. pilot the platform in health and community settings - generating citizen science evidence and a plan for scalability.

PEACE will deliver this new knowledge collaboratively with lived-experience, humanities, primary health care, public health, arts and First Nations researchers. The digital platform will be co-created using crowdsourcing of innovations (2023), co-design and testing within the Big Anxiety festival (2024), then refinement for implementation in a service setting pilot (2025). The 'BigaagaARri' platform will be an immersive media environment that is universally available to increase public education, but is used in parallel to deliver targeted preventive care to facilitate holistic health conversations.

Lead Researchers and collaborators

The research team for this project are:

Funding

Funded by 2021 MRFF Consumer-Led Research (Stream 2) 2023-2026