Healthy Boost project news

Jelgava Local Municipality promotes healthy, local, seasonal catering at schools in their Healthy Boost pilot project.

These videos are prepared by nutritionist Olga Lubina both for children and their parents about importance of healthy meals. Videos are published in YouTube and the language is Latvian:

On 21 October this year, researchers in the Healthy Boost project from the Institute of Public Health (Riga Stradiņš University) had a meeting with Uldis Mitenbergs, a Head of Country Office Latvia at World Health Organization, and health promotion experts from the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. 

The Helsinki pilot aims to strengthen the participation of under-represented groups in social activities and decision-making, and to build equal opportunities for influence to improve wellbeing. The pilot was carried out as a part of the city’s implementation of its “OmaStadi” participatory budgeting projects in 2020-2021. AR-technology helped realize the OmaStadi idea phase video guide as well as the 3D model of an outdoor sports facility based on an OmaStadi idea. OmaStadi marketing and PR also made use of the solution.

Boosting cross-sectoral cooperation is the most important output in the “Healthy Boost” project. Gathering together people from different sectors, which is resulting in getting more opinions, a wider range of views and perspectives of citizens, who are actually living in the world, which cities and municipalities policies are creating is an added value during every administration project. 

The Valoa Turkuun (Light to Turku) series told hopeful stories that looked for an optimistic future during an exceptional time at the Covid-19 epidemic. The series consisted of ten videos and online articles with photographs.

The City of Poznan developed a new mobile application, which was created to give citizens a space to share their stories related to COVID-19 pandemic experience. The whole pilot of Poznan was dedicated to assess the changing situation, help health professionals on the first front in the fight with the disease and evaluate the cross-sectoral cooperation during lock-down.

The focus of the Turku pilot is communication. The aim is to find ways to communicate about health and wellbeing services, and that way help city residents to make choices that support their health and wellbeing. Also, our goal is to encourage city residents to participate in the decision-making. To reach a sustainable result, Turku has approached these challenges from different angles. Turku targeted residents directly and worked with city employees and NGOs providing services for them. The game developed within the Healthy Boost project supports the latter approach.

The Model for cross-sectoral cooperation is designed and developed to provide an overview of key cross-sectoral cooperation elements that are a paramount prerequisite for modern health promotion.

The Model was developed by researchers of Riga Stradins University based on a systematic review and analysis of the scientific literature, and the results of a self-assessment of cross-sectoral collaboration for health promotion conducted by professionals and experts in the Healthy Boost project partner cities.

Pilot activities included cooperation with nutritionist who evaluated existing recipes in two pilot schools and proposed new menus for 5 days in each season – autumn, winter, spring. Nutritionist was also involved in giving lectures regarding healthy eating habits and masterclasses for school chefs and pupils of the grade 1 to 4. Only autumn season activities were possible to organize in schools, winter and spring season pupils studied remotely and also cooking took place in their own kitchens together with parents.

As a part of our Healthy Boost pilot project, we tested some augmented reality (AR) tools as a part of marketing of the City's participatory budgeting OmaStadi. The webAR-based 3D model of the Puotilankenttä playing field in the Eastern part of the City illustrates the improvements voted to the execution by the city residents. 

On 20 May 2021, the city of Pskov hosted a workshop (business game Game of Goals: Ekecheiria – a model for cross-sectoral cooperation) within the project "Healthy Boost - Urban Labs for Better Health for All in the Baltic Sea Region – boosting cross-sectoral cooperation for health and wellbeing in the cities" of the Interreg. Baltic Sea Region. The event was organised by: Pskov City Administration, Association "Healthy Cities, Districts and Villages".

During Spring 2021, partner Region Västerbotten has been responsible for conducting peer-reviews in the Healthy Boost project. The aim was to provide an understanding in relation to the piloting cities’ usability and experiences of using the Model for Cross-Sectoral Cooperation. The information was collected using questionnaires and one-on-one interviews with each of the primary pilot city coordinator in the Healthy Boost project.

Something big is coming!

Tartu has established a Facebook page "Kõnni ja Kõnele" (Walk and talk) where people can share their experiences of outdoor meetings.

Actually, not only about outdoor meetings, but all good ideas how to make a working day more active, what is happening in the city that could be useful for physical activity or mental wellbeing, challenges that make people want to be more active, TedX talks or books to read etc.

Klaipeda's Healthy Boost pilot is the development of sustainable mobility activities in Klaipeda city. The most recent actions include co-design workshops for developing the VR tool with the VR developers from Iron Cat company and participating the European Mobility Week.

Two photographs from the co-designing workshops:

flyAR Augmented Reality Studio has built an Augmented Reality experience for Tartu city pilot. View the video to see what it's all about.

Since March, covid-19 restrictions have forced Healthy Boost partners to find new ways of working together online – as has been the case for rest of Europe. How have our partners managed in this? What is transnational cooperation in times of epidemic?