If you’re the kind of person who wears a heart monitor while jogging, tracks your sleep with an app or meditates to lengthen your lifespan, then a new Stanford project, called WELL, just might be for you.
WELL, which stands for the Wellness Living Laboratory hasn’t started quite yet — it will launch in 2015 — but when it does, it will unleash a variety of cutting-edge tools in an effort to define health.
Health seems like a no-brainer, but it is more than the absence of disease, says John Ioannidis , MD, DSc, the head of the Stanford Prevention Research Center. Ioannidis wants to find out how people can be “more healthy than healthy.”
To do that, he secured $10 million and laid out plans for the project. WELL plans to enroll thousands of volunteers — who Ioannidis calls “citizen scientists” — in two initial locations: Santa Clara County, Calif., and China, with plans to expand to other sites in the future.
Participants may be able to select which health factors to track and to report much of their information remotely and digitally, although some in-person visits may be required. Participants will also have the opportunity to enroll in a variety of clinical trials to test various interventions, such as nutrition counseling or smoking cessation programs.
The program will focus on wellness, rather than diseases, with the hypothesis that promoting wellness thwarts diseases, Ioannidis said.
Volunteers who would rather not provide health information will also have the opportunity to benefit from access to a program-wide social networking effort that will spread news of successful practices, he said. “This outer sphere could reach out to tens of millions of people,” Ioannidis told me. Stay tuned to learn how to sign up.
The $10 million came as an unrestricted gift to Stanford University from Amway's Nutrilite Health Institute Wellness Fund.
Previously: Medicine X explores the relationship between mental and physical health, Stanford partnering with Google [x] and Duke to better understand the human body, New Stanford center aims to promote research excellence and Teens these days smoking less but engaging in other risky behaviors
Photo by: Mike Baird
