Sitting in a suit, jeans, sneakers and a casual white shirt, the psychiatrist Gaël Fournis reconstructs a 20 centimeter tower in Kapla. And for good reason. Encouraged by his dad, Flavio, 5 and a half years old, has just destroyed it with a remote-controlled ball rolling like a racing car. A little set back on a chair, Axelle, 12 and a half, subtly handles a multicolored robot, despite her arm passing under her sweatshirt because of an infusion. At the other end of the room, lying on her bed moved from her room, Namizata, 10, has finished her aquatic immersion with her virtual reality headset. Smartphone in hand, she fiercely pilots a drone attached to a green balloon inflated with helium. Its exploration is so bold that the pocket dirigible escapes from the room to float merrily in the corridor, to the delight of the little girl, all smiles.
This Tuesday afternoon, February 14, the eve of International Childhood Cancer Day, the entertainment room at 9e floor of the Institut Gustave-Roussy, in Villejuif, offers a parenthesis of lightness to a dozen children undergoing treatment and their parents. A moment of discovery of digital objects that the association Draw me high-tech, co-founded in 2019 by Gaël Fournis, now offers in around ten university hospitals and healthcare centers in France, from Brest to Nice, via Paris, Tours and Marseille. Each time, a small team of volunteers leads these workshops in pediatric oncology departments.
How did this 36-year-old Breton psychiatrist, keen on criminology and expert with the Rennes Court of Appeal, find himself in this adventure? It all started in the spring of 2018, remembers the one who was then a full-time hospital psychiatrist in Rennes. The father of a young child with cancer, Grégory Nimod, contacted him. This engineer wants to bring together multiple skills in an aid association around pediatric cancers. A year of reflection later, Draw me high-tech was born with two aims: to provide patients with moments of technological escape, “in particular to defocus and reduce pain and stress”explains Gaël Fournis, and help pediatric oncology research through artificial intelligence (AI).
Surprising findings
The first objective, high-tech animation, will be successfully tested in 2019 in the pediatric oncohematology department of the Rennes University Hospital. The surprise advent of confinement, which upsets the way of communicating, paradoxically helps the association to achieve its second, more unusual purpose. Without complex and presenting themselves in pairs, Gaël the psychiatrist and Grégory the engineer knock digitally and remotely on the doors of the largest pediatric cancer centers (Instituts Curie and Gustave-Roussy, Ihope in Lyon) in order to offer voluntary services in intelligence artificial. Their strength, they announce by email, is a host of talented data scientists. “Initially, friends or friends of friends, working in large companies”, says Grégory Nimod, himself an engineer at Orange. In this period when skills in AI and complex data analysis are largely recruited by private economic actors, the argument hits the mark and the doors of research centers are opening. In an unprecedented way, these people meet in videoconferences by Zoom to discuss possible projects.
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