HELIO: a new tool to explore 20 years of progress in Australia
Have you ever wondered how affordable housing is for seniors in regional Australia? Or about food insecurity for women with disability? If so, you might be interested in a soon-to-be launched tool called HELIO.
HELIO, the Health, Environmental, and Lifestyle Intersectional Observatory, is an interactive website that explores how Australians have progressed over the past 20 years. Its goal is to make high-quality data accessible and easy to navigate. With just a few clicks, users can explore indicators ranging from sleep quality to unpaid care. But there is a twist: HELIO doesn’t show just national trends, it lets users explore changing inequalities by selecting two characteristics (such as income, sex, and disability) and see how their intersection relates to their topic of interest.
“One of the first things we looked at was smoking, age, and education. While 14% of Australians smoked in 2022 – down from 23% in 2002 – almost half of adults with Year 11 education and below still smoked in 2022, with almost no change in the past two decades. It’s a huge difference we weren’t aware of” said lead researcher Dr Thiago Melo from the Nossal Institute. “It shows the potential of HELIO to uncover inequalities that need to be addressed.”
HELIO was developed by researchers at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health with support from its Centre for Health Equity. Its current version has 17 indicators, and over 75,000 estimates. It is also being tested as a learning tool in several University of Melbourne subjects. Students choose a topic, build a hypothesis, and test it using real data. “They’re often surprised by results that challenge their assumptions. We are very excited to launch HELIO in the coming months, once we have done more extensive testing,” said Thiago.
The HELIO website is being developed thanks to a grant from the Centre for Health Equity (CHE) Seed Incubator Scheme.
Dr Thiago Melo Santos, a Research Fellow with the Nossal Institute for Global Health, is a social epidemiologist specialising in health inequality monitoring, particularly in the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector and among people with disabilities.