09 Feb MEET OUR PARTNER: Roessingh Rehabilitation Center, the research team
The RRD is one of the key tech partners of SmartWork responsible for the development of the exciting healthyMe app. Meet the people behind it:
What is the main role of RRD in SmartWork?
Roessingh Research and Development (RRD) is one of the technical partners in the SmartWork project. Particularly, RRD is the main responsible for the development of the healthyMe smartphone application and the iCare service.
The healthyMe app supports older office workers in reaching and maintaining a healthy lifestyle by providing personalized coaching on daily physical activity, sleep, and nutrition. By combining data collected with wearable devices with information gathered in conversations with the virtual agent Amelia, the healthyMe application provides personalized insights on the daily behaviour of the individuals and provides personalized tips to promote health and wellbeing. For more information on this service please see the blog.
The iCare service allows the user to share the information collected with the healthyMe app with other people. As a strong focus is placed on privacy and control, the office worker can configure within the healthyMe app which data they want to share, from which period of time, and with whom (e.g., relatives and physiotherapist). The caregiver can then see the information on a web-portal dedicated to the iCare service.
Through its multidisciplinary team – including requirements engineers, biomedical engineers, and computer scientists – with more than 15 years of experience in the development of digital health solutions to support self-management of chronic diseases in daily life, RRD has a central role in defining the behavioural interventions to be implemented in the SmartWork services.
What was the idea behind your participation in this project?
The concept of the SmartWork project fits the RRD mission of “enabling people with a physical or cognitive disability to participate in society as independently and meaningfully as possible by smartly making use of new technology”. One of the most important ways to ensure that people participate in society is to guarantee that they can keep working for as long as possible, according to their possibilities and wishes.
In the SmartWork project, the RRD team is committed to developing digital health solutions that support the office worker in maintaining a healthy lifestyle while at the workplace, at home, and on-the-go. With the boundaries between workplace and home environment being challenged with the recent COVID-19 outbreak and the need to work from home, it became even more important to develop solutions that attend to the wellbeing of office workers at all times.
What added value do you expect SmartWork will bring to your research center and its researchers?
With the SmartWork project, the research team at RRD is deepening its knowledge on the application of digital health solutions to support health and wellbeing at work and at home. Furthermore, the SmartWork project gave us the opportunity to greatly upgrade our technology platform, specifically focusing on the re-design of the mobile application. Within SmartWork we took a serious look at the user experience, which is of paramount importance when working older adults have to gain value from using the application during their daily lives. We fully redesigned this user experience and even expanded our platform to work on iOS devices. Moreover, the SmartWork project also allowed to strengthen existing and foster new collaborations with occupational therapy experts at the national and international level as part of the dissemination, communication, and exploitation activities. With the SmartWork project, RRD is strengthening its position as a key entity in the development of digital health technologies to promote health and wellb