Admitted funding in 2021

 

 

THE FINNISH HOME AND SUSTAINABLE WELFARE INTERCONNECTIONS 

The context of our study is the Finnish home. We seek to provide understanding of residents’ everyday life and the diverse practices, needs and meanings that are connected to the concept of home and to create an understanding of the connections and implications between sustainable welfare and our living environments.  Understanding the complex interconnections between the home, the design of living environments (for a diversity of people and needs), and citizen’s health and well-being, with implications for welfare systems, is fundamental to avoid ’locking in’ unsustainable welfare policies or housing infrastructures for decades to come. Only by understanding these links can we create sustainable welfare policies and sustainable housing designs that prioritise residents’ health and well-being. This seed-funding will enable us to start mapping these connections and make a real impact in these different areas.

Contact: olli.kampman@tuni.fi

 

Good Life for the older people – sustainable approaches by combining life course perspectives and interventions

Life expectancy in years has been steadily increasing over the last decades. However, the expectancy of good years is not keeping pace. There is a need to consider Good Life Expectancy instead of traditional expectancy measures.

Sustainable Good Life is a multifaceted concept; it covers health, but also includes, e.g., social participation and support, experienced meaningfulness of life, feelings of security, and interactions with the environment, and takes into account future generations.

We:

1. identify and map the factors affecting sustainable Good Life from a holistic viewpoint,;
2. explore how these factors, may be assessed, quantified and combined using different information sources;
3. provide initial requirements towards an integrative information analysis and action framework that can be used as a tool to measure and steer actions at different levels, including supporting health and social care policies, interventions and preventive actions.

Contact: mark.vangils@tuni.fi

WHO Observatory on Social Determinants of Health

The WHO Observatory on Social Determinants of Health in Tampere University will address the social determinants of health and equity in Finland. The skills and capacities in Tampere University help generate state of the art evidence on the social determinants from multiple disciplines as well as linking it to current policy debates.

WHO has already designated Tampere University as a WHO Collaborating Centre to support research and knowledge translation on this area. The Collaborating Centre will work as a base for the observatory activities. https://www.tuni.fi/en/research/who-collaborating-centre

The observatory has received seed funding from the Sustainable Welfare Systems programme and the development of its activities will start in August 2021.

Contact: lauri.kokkinen@tuni.fi

FROM DEMOLISHED HOUSING COMMUNITIES TO NEW HOMES

The project starts by scrutinizing urban renewal and the infill development of one housing community where the buildings are under decommissioning due to forthcoming demolition of the buildings. The housing community is comprising approximately 200 living-quarters and over 200 residents. Later on, the project is intended to be expanded by taking two similar kind of demolishing housing communities under research. A special challenge related to the infill development by providing supplementary buildings to the current residents, is often their societally and socially vulnerable state. The research project will produce novel information on how different stakeholders’ involvement and relational agency appear at different stages of the processes and how enduring the new living arrangements for the former residents will appear. The special focus is on it, how residents’ needs and wishes are taken into account in the processes. In analyzing the processes, the project makes use the concept of ‘housing pathway’, the principle of ‘Housing First’, and more broadly the frame of housing segregation. As part of the project an explicit detection and description of the urban renewal processes is crafted. Hence, the lessons learned from the project will provide valuable information for future and vaster projects, in terms of urban renewal and simultaneously avoiding societal harm and disadvantages for the residents.

Contact: kirsi.juhila@tuni.fi

 

i-PROACH: Integrated Platform for Research, Outcome Assessment and Care in Mental Health

The current multidisciplinary and international initiative is aiming to facilitate the further implementation of mental health registers and translation of biobank data in everyday practice.

Our aim is to enable personalised diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders with a focus on psychotic and mood disorders by elaboration of integrated platform i-PROACH, which utilizes the data lake architecture between data sources (registers, biobanks and electronic health records)

The project objectives are:

To facilitate better translation of large and multi-disciplinary data into predictors of medical outcomes and personalised decision making in mental health.

To contribute personalised mental healthcare by providing reusable data (registers, biobanks) and better data quality, interoperability and standards, including data safety, privacy protection, and by collecting evidence with an evaluation of healthcare outcomes.

To elaborate models for the digital healthcare in mental disease (e.g. depression and schizophrenia) that result from the transformation of traditional models of care, patient journeys and clinical pathways to the new personalised and predictor-based digitized clinical workflows

To elaborate models towards better decision making and outcomes for patients with mental disorders (e.g. depression and schizophrenia) by using AI and machine learning techniques that will be inferred from the rich datasets (registers, biobanks).

To define the overall target of interoperability of the i-PROACH platform, enable its mutual integration via coding system harmonization, and facilitate the smooth operation of platform towards a systematised health record coding in mental healthcare.

Contact: olli.kampman@tuni.fi