Project Description:
The aim of “Every Walk You Take” (EWYT) is to empower the local inhabitants of Barcelona to experience an active and healthy ageing process. A uHealth platform with personalized healthy routes according to the user geolocalization, and preferences and with real-time information on air quality and climate, will be co-created and tested in a pilot study in a project managed by a stakeholder community.
Project Type: Kick Starter
Theme: Cities for Life, Mobility, Health
Mentor: Christiane Grill
Taking Positive Steps towards Health
Our project, named “Every Walk You Take” (EWyT) aims to revolutionise the way residents of Barcelona age healthily. This project involves a diverse stakeholder group, researchers from the University of Barcelona and students, local community agents, policymakers and citizens. The project will utilise a uHealth platform, which will have the EWyT mobile application. This application will create personalized walking routes using users’ geo-localization and preferences; it will integrate this personal data with real-time information on air quality and climate. This app will be tested in a pilot study, where citizen scientists will test out the app by walking the routes provided, and uploading images and audio recordings of the ‘barriers’ and ‘facilitators’ of physical activity and healthy ageing.
This project involves a diverse stakeholder group, researchers from the University of Barcelona and students. It is a project that involves professionals but also considers the opinions of the local community. The stakeholders and citizen scientists were recruited from the lifelong learning centres in 2 neighbourhoods of Barcelona (Trinitat Vella and Bon Pastor) and work for this project was done at the University of Barcelona (UB). The lead researcher on this project is Maria Grau Magaña, a professor from the School of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Barcelona.
The holistic approach of integrating real-time climate data with user data aims to boost the well-being and health of the population. Ideally, it would serve as a crucial tool in the prevention of non-communicable diseases, which are the leading cause of death in the European Union and worldwide.
“Every Walk You Take” should not be seen as a standalone project as it is part of a larger vision. In the long term, it will serve as a vital component of an intelligent health record system, which will integrate data from various sources. Additionally, EWyT can independently be used as an app, accessible to health professionals, policymakers, citizens, researchers, and educators.
There is also a great potential to implement this platform in other cities around the world with similar infrastructures and environmental databases.
IMPETUS has been an extremely helpful partner in our EWyT project, as they have provided us with several accelerator sessions that have imparted us essential training and guidance. Additionally, IMPETUS has instilled in us the belief that our project can make a meaningful impact on the community and kept our confidence levels high.
Written by:
Preet Naik1,2 & María Grau2,3,4
1 University College of London (UCL), UK
2 University of Barcelona
3 Biomedical Research Consortium in Epidemiology and Public Health, Spain
4 August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute, Barcelona
