This Preston man’s medical support idea for children in hospital is taking off world wide
and live on Freeview channel 276
Dom Raban came up with the concept for Xploro after his experiences while his daughter was undergoing cancer treatment.
He noticed that doctors often directed their information to parents, side-lining the children who were receiving often scary and painful treatment.
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Hide AdWith his background as a designer running digital and creative agencies, Dom was in an ideal position to do something about it.
He began developing Xploro - a tablet-based system that would provide children with age-appropriate information relevant to their conditions and treatments.
Now hospitals are using Xploro in the UK, America (including the Boston Children’s Hospital) and Spain and Singapore, but it needed further translation to enable a broader take-up on the international market and especially in North America.
International Trade Adviser Jenny Mooney worked with Dom to access the Internationalisation Fund, a co-investment grant scheme initiated and sustained by the DIT and supported by the European Regional Development Fund. It provided a match-funded grant of £9,000 to cover US English and Latin American Spanish translation costs.
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Hide AdBoth language versions are needed to make Xploro acceptable in America.
US English includes terminology and spellings different from UK English and Latin American Spanish because it is spoken as a first language by 13 per cent of the US population – almost 41 million people.
Translations also enabled Xploro to get support from KidsX – an American paediatric care accelerator that brings together top children’s hospitals and digital health companies to build, test and deploy software solutions to improve paediatric care.
Dom said: “Collaboration with KidsX will enable us to get accepted more quickly and widely in the US. We built the software to be easily localised into different languages. The more it grows, the more effective the system will become as we build the information platform to include more treatments.
“Support from the DIT has been crucial to gain broader international acceptance of Xploro. We will continue to use their expertise and wide-ranging international network of contacts to expand the business.”
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Hide AdFulwood-based Xploro launched at the end of 2020. Dom was originally the sole employee, but he now has a team of ten due to grow to 25 by the end of the year.