Webbinarium: Proactive health and welfare technology for Nordic users and societies

To successfully support the use of health and welfare technology, it is necessary to understand the challenges it faces and the opportunities it provides at micro, meso and macro level. PROTECT project has performed three workshops focusing on the three levels, starting with the micro level and the users.

To this webinar, we welcome end users, policy makers and researchers as well as national, regional and local project owners in the area of implementing health and welfare technologies.

The PROTECT project and its Nordic workshop series synthesize and advance Nordic research-based knowledge of proactive health and welfare technology (HWT) with a user and societal perspective at three levels:

(1) End-users, notably older clients/patients and people with disabilities and their informal caregivers.
(2) Implementation; the perspective of professional caregivers.
(3) The societal level.

The new knowledge co-created in PROTECT contributes to understanding the specific contexts and life situations where proactive health and welfare technology, HWT, is expected to be increasingly applied in the Nordic countries. The new knowledge also encourages and enables further research on the topic. The novelty of the project lies essentially in the multi- and transdisciplinary approach, the focus on proactive HWT, and the combination of the three levels’ perspectives within this focus. The project covers diverse groups of users – end-users (older clients/patients and people with disabilities, and their informal caregivers) and professional users – in a nuanced way.

PROTECT has brought together a large group of Nordic researchers from several fields as well as stakeholders, altogether nearly 200 workshop participants from four countries. The project has created a unique platform for discussing proactive HWT and developed novel frameworks and long-term research collaboration.

Broad collaboration with stakeholders from the three levels and supporting early-career researchers are key issues for PROTECT.

Speakers:

Helinä Melkas, Professor, LUT University, Finland

Christine Gustafsson, Professor, Sophiahemmet University, Sweden

Stig-H Nilsson, SPF Seniorerna, Sweden

Bjørnar Alexander Andreassen, Program Manager, Norwegian Directorate of Health, Norway

Moderator:

Bengt Andersson, Nordic Welfare Centre

The project is implemented by Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology LUT (Finland; the coordinator), Mälardalen University (Sweden), Norwegian Centre for E-health Research, and Danish Dementia Research Centre. It is funded by NOS-HS (The joint committee for Nordic research councils in the humanities and social sciences) via NordForsk and supported by Nordic Welfare Centre and the Nordic Research Network on Health and Welfare Technology.

Link to the webinar (Zoom)

Program