Theme
Health and wellbeing are recognized to be central issues in a modern society. For instance, in its renewed strategy, Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, has specified the vitality of people to be one of its six strategic focus areas. A multidisciplinary view on how information technologies can be applied to support the health and wellbeing of people is the focus of the summer school. The course concentrates on how vitality and health can be maintained and promoted rather than on the biomedical aspects.
The Summer School will bring together students, researchers, and company representatives to provide a view to latest research activities and business actors related to health and wellbeing. Social media and ubiquitous computing solutions provide a fruitful platform for increasing social and individual wellbeing. Moreover, these environments gather large collections of data directly or indirectly related to the wellbeing of individuals in everyday life contexts. The analysis of these kind of data may reveal important underlying patterns and also facilitate provision of personalized information and coaching. How to design concepts and human computer interfaces for systems that provide wellbeing information and experiences is an interesting challenge. A central topic of the summer school is to consider how these kinds of inventions turn into innovations. Through case studies, wellbeing technology concepts will be developed in a problem-based manner taking into account usability and business aspects.
We would like the attending students to have a genuine interest in the area of wellbeing & lifestyle, and an interest in working in the field as part of one's career, as well as an interest in meeting and discussing with the company representatives in this field. For engineering students the camp will offer a chance to interact with concept design students, as well as to get an idea of the concept design process in the context of developing a wellbeing product.