GetAMoveOn:transforming health through enabling mobility

When we move more, we become smarter; as we become stronger, chronic pain decreases. Greater movement, especially in social contexts, improves collaboration. As we move, not only do we reduce stress: we improve our capacity to handle stressful situations and to see more options for creative new solutions. Movement enhances both strength and stamina, improves bone mineral density and balance, reducing incidence of falling and associated hip injuries (causes of death in the elderly). Movement complements other functions, from assisting with sleep and therefore memory and cognition, to helping with diet and associated hormones - improving insulin sensitivity and balancing cortisol. There are recent studies showing benefits of movement related to dementia. And yet, physical inactivity is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide; sedentarism has been called the "new smoking". Meanwhile costs to UK GDP from sedentarism and associated disease are increasing - from sick days lost to work, to elders losing mobility and having to move into care homes.

We have designed ourselves into our sedentarism: sitting during our commute, at desks while we work, and at home on the sofa. There is a critical need to design ourselves back into the natural effects of health accrued simply by moving more. We need solutions that will help build both the evidence and the experience that movement can enhance and benefit people's lives.

New technologies are transforming our ability to capture lifestyle data on individuals in real time. Consumer technologies such as step counters and wifi scales are the tip of an iceberg - research programmes worldwide are proposing lifestyle data capture from devices ranging from video cameras to electricity meters to wearables. Meanwhile pervasive connectivity allows that data to be transmitted, processed through powerful machine learning tools and provided back to people in a heartbeat. While we understand the potential technologies, we do not yet know how to leverage the technology effectively to support transformative health.

Current approaches in ehealth generally only reach a small part of the population that is already interested in fitness, personal data capture, or both. Their uptake is, furthermore, of dubious effect as two recent medical reviews have shown. To have a national impact on health and wellbeing, to reduce the crippling burden of long term health conditions and to move healthcare from the clinic to the community, we need to reach everyone, across a range of abilities and aspirations. We need to connect the potential of the technology with the potential of people and realise the benefits of a healthy, brilliant, population.

Realising this potential requires research on novel technical solutions, supported by theories from sports and health sciences on blending appropriate movement strategies for particular performance aspirations to behavioural and cognitive sciences on ways to engage people to make effective and meaningful progress. We need to understand what measures are appropriate not just to evaluate progress, but to guide it and adapt to it. To have meaningful impact across these dimensions we need to combine a range of expertise including sensor networks, data analytics, interactive visualisation, human computer interacton, online citizen engagement, behaviour change, sports, exercise.

In this network we focus on movement as a locus for health: it is our test case as it drives so many other benefits that are of value: economically, socially and culturally. The current call is the ideal opportunity to establish our proposed network to develop an interdisciplinary UK community that will address the EPSRC Grand Challenge of transforming community health and care through the delivery of tested technologies that promote wellbeing by providing timely, individualised feedback that encourages appropriate activities.

This NetworkPlus will have impact across a wide range of areas. The goal of our network is to help move our nation from being sedentary to active by understanding the role interactive technology can have in supporting this transition, and in delivering future technological solutions that are truly fit for purpose. Our engagement strategies will bring together experts in health and sport science, behavioural psychology, network systems, sensors, and human computer interaction, to create the critical mass of experts required to address this key challenge in UK welfare that will deliver improved health nationwide.

When we move more, research unequivocally shows, we are smarter, healthier, calmer and more creative, simply as side effects of this activity. One example of longer term impact will be the methods and technologies developed by the Network that can be used to motivate people to be more physically active, through the detection and communication of changes in personal physical, emotional, cognitive and social (PECS) factors. The collaborations and projects fostered, with our focus on in-the-wild pilots, will create the foundation of knowledge that can be used for developing larger scale projects and deployments, with increasing beneficial impact.

In addition, increased movement will result in a reduction in the demand for expensive healthcare by enabling individuals to detect minor PECS issues early on and address them through suitable lifestyle interventions before they manifest as larger health problems. Our goal in this network is to help people discover how they can move enough to achieve these side effects for whatever their aspirations, from feeling and performing better at school, to being more productive and participating in the labour market for longer, to staying independent longer in their own homes, thus reducing costs to the economy. We will further expand the network by involving health technology companies who want to build applications in the network, providing them with the opportunity to work with researchers to develop theory-informed solutions that are useful, usable and used.

To secure impact stories such as these we will conduct three workshops that each focus on a particular sector such as education, workplaces and residential care communities. These communities have been chosen because of the different types of impact they have the potential to elicit within each context. The network will also fund feasibility projects that will be required to work directly with community groups. The network will have societal impact through improving the quality of life of these and other individuals through the development of technologies that enhance health and wellbeing through impact on physical, emotional, cognitive and social factors. We will work closely with UKactive and others to ensure the evidence from these projects has an influence on the development of national policies.

With respects to impacting individuals, people from community groups involved in network projects and events will learn about the development of research through co-design processes. We will run two competitions that engage school children, university students and members of the public. We will also support Network members in developing their own outreach and public engagement activities. In addition the Network will support capacity building and skill development of early career and established researchers through hosting two doctoral consortia and running two training events.