Healthy Daily Living
Our society is faced with a number of major challenges including health-related ones, such as aging, obesity, cardio-vascular diseases or social isolation.
- Research group Designing Quality in Interaction
- Focus Area leader Caroline Hummels
When looking at the field of public health, we are currently faced with a situation where, if no fundamental change takes place, an increasing number of people will ask for an increase in quality of life while having to rely on increasingly expensive healthcare paid by a decreasing number of people, up to a point that it is no longer suitable and maintainable.
Technology can support us in addressing societal challenges. It can stimulate certain behavior and discourage other behavior, as well as amplify or reduce specific aspects of reality, thus supporting us to improve our health. However, addressing these major societal challenges is not that straightforward: they often ask for systemic change and require many different stakeholders to tackle the challenge.
The Healthy Daily Living research area aims at empowerment for wellbeing and healthy living: from prevention to care. It aims to bring about systemic change and support quality of life by developing and optimizing personal and value- centred complex health systems. We do so by integrating personal, contextual and technological elements with innovate complex health systems.
Healthy Daily Living targets three areas
- human vitality and technology
- healthy cities and smart societies
- interactive technologies and health continuum
We develop devices, systems and living environments, as well as related theories, methods and tools to support quality of life in these three areas. Within this research area, we aim to develop solutions for healthy daily living through design, system thinking and co- creation in real-world environments. For this, we use Fieldlabs and Experiential Design Landscapes to explore, use, test and validate new innovative processes and systems in real-world situations. In this way, we can also address the systemic character of challenges and solutions.