A young child sitting at home using a tablet, focused and at ease

Fharmaverso

How Madrid's public hospitals turned a daily injection into an adventure for children

Support for children on growth hormone treatment

3: hospitals
6–12: years
~50: children

The context

A daily injection that no child wants to face alone

Fharmaverso is a digital companion for children who are treated with growth hormone — a medicine that has to be injected at home, day after day, often for years. It was created by MetaMedicsVR together with the hospital pharmacy teams that look after these young patients, and it is built around a simple promise written on its own home page: to help children learn, practise and beat their fear of treatment by playing.

The project began in 2022 at the pharmacy service of Hospital de Getafe in Madrid, where it was selected as a finalist in the Innovation Forum of the Spanish Society of Hospital Pharmacy (the professional body that brings together hospital pharmacists). With that recognition, and later with funding from Horizon Europe — the European Union's research and innovation programme — it grew into a tool used today across three public hospitals.

Three groups sit at the centre of the experience: the children themselves, their families, and the healthcare staff who guide the treatment and follow each child's progress.

A friendly doctor with a stethoscope examining a smiling child during a check-up

The challenge

When fear and routine get in the way of the treatment

Sticking to a daily injection is hard for anyone, and harder still for a child. For young patients on growth hormone, the obstacles tend to be the same ones over and over:

Fear and anxiety around needles, which can turn every dose into a small battle.
Uncertainty about how to prepare and give the injection correctly at home.
The sheer weight of routine — a treatment that must be kept up for months or years.
Families who feel alone between hospital visits, with no easy way to reinforce what they were taught.

This is not only a feeling. Keeping up with long-term treatments is a well-documented problem: the World Health Organization estimates that, on average, only about half of people with chronic illnesses in developed countries take their medication as prescribed. In growth hormone treatment specifically, scientific reviews have found that many children miss doses, and injection-related anxiety is named as one of the factors behind it. When a treatment is skipped, its benefit fades — so helping a child face it calmly is not a nice extra, it is part of the therapy.

A child sitting on a chair at home concentrating on a tablet

What we built

A superhero academy where learning the treatment is part of the adventure

Fharmaverso turns the treatment into a friendly adventure that children can open from a phone, a tablet or a computer, and fit into their daily routine. Instead of a leaflet of instructions, they step into a kind of superhero academy guided by a cheerful robot teacher who explains every action, step by step. The platform brings together three pieces that work as one.

The three pieces of the experience

Interactive 3D simulations: realistic models of the actual injection devices let children rehearse, as many times as they need, how to prepare and give the dose, where on the body it goes, and what to do in everyday situations.
Healthy-habit minigames: playful challenges about good food, physical activity and sleep routines that wrap self-care into something fun.
Narrative comics: stories of a team of young heroes who, when they start their growth hormone treatment, gain superpowers to defeat the dreaded Monster of Fear — comics that quietly normalise the treatment and reward courage.

Holding it all together is a reward system designed to keep children coming back. As they progress, they earn an official superhero ID card, unlock themed comics and collect achievement badges for each milestone. Meanwhile, healthcare staff can follow each child's experience and progress day by day, so the support continues between hospital visits instead of stopping at the clinic door.

A child engaged in an interactive learning activity on a screen at home

Why it matters

From a feared routine to something children can master

Fharmaverso is in use today at three public hospitals in the Madrid region — Getafe, Fuenlabrada and Ramón y Cajal — with a fourth, the children's hospital Niño Jesús, set to join. In its pilot phase it has accompanied around fifty children. Rather than promising a number we cannot yet prove, the project's own aim is clear: to build the confidence and the skills that let a child handle their treatment with less fear, and to lift some of the worry from families and from the staff who care for them.

What makes the approach travel well is that nothing about it is exclusive to growth hormone. The teams behind it see a clear path to other paediatric conditions that need an injection at home — childhood diabetes among them — and, more broadly, to any treatment given under the skin. As Teresa Molina, head of the pharmacy service at Hospital de Getafe, puts it:

Any condition that currently relies on subcutaneous hospital medication could benefit from a tool like this.

That is the heart of Fharmaverso: a warm, empathetic way to take something that frightens a child and turn it into a story they want to be part of — one where they are not the patient, but the hero.

If you recognise your own situation here, let's talk about how it could work for you.

A child wearing a cape posing confidently, like a small superhero

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