Project Summary
In this project, sponsored by the Foundation of EPFL Students (Fondation pour Les Étudiants de l’EPFL – FEE), we target to improve the current wellness condition of the EPFL and UNIL students at the EPFL campus. In particular, we target to develop a non-intrusive and scalable wearable monitoring framework that can be used by the Sport and Health Center (Centre Sport et Santé – CSS) of UNIL and EPFL to customize their training for each group students on campus. In addition, the goal is to motivate new students that try to become more physically active on the EPFL campus by providing them a customized monitoring tool where they can observe accurately their gradual health improvement as they train over time.
The common basis of this project to monitor the wellness status for participants of all ages at the EPFL campus members is that we all operate on oxygen: students, EPFL employees, amateur or professional sportsmen, etc. Moreover, this ‘fuel’ circulates thanks to our cardio-vascular system. Therefore, the greater our physiological needs, the more our need for oxygen increases and our cardio-vascular system adapts itself to the situation. Regardless of being a student with light training due to lack of time during the week, or heavy training of more active students on the weekend, these activities are all managed by the same physiological needs. Hence, there should be a common framework for the complete week to be able to monitor which efforts we provide to our bodies and metrics to estimate if we have the energy required to carry out our daily activities as well as enough to restore itself.
In particular, our cardiovascular system is regulated by the central nervous system, which receives information from our entire body and modulates the heart and all physiological activity in order to meet various demands. It is therefore essential for this system to be capable of responding to each of the physiological workloads during the week. However, after each excess strain, we must give to our body time to recover, and each of our bodies required different time to adapt to its new conditions due to our own regulation of the central nervous system. For this purpose, we want to develop a suitable tool at the EPFL campus level that can be adapted for each student (or set of groups of students of similar physical health and stress conditions), to set proper periods of rest or recovery for each person and avoid first acute fatigue followed by pathological lesions. Therefore, the CSS is very interested in including this approach in their daily practices to make sure that their personalization of sports training can properly deal with physiologically (or psychologically) exhausted EPFL-UNIL students. Thanks to this project, we will prevent the onset of these pathologies by enhancing the cardiovascular performance of students – and personnel on campus, and avoiding yielding to, occasionally irreversible, illnesses.
This project will be developed by a complementary team of EPFL, UNIL, CSS and the start-up Be.Care to put in place a framework that will use data from students and personnel on the EPFL-UNIL campus (Heart Rate, Heart Rate Variability, training load, and questionnaires) with the latest wearable technology (smartwatches and a custom App in smartphones). This data will be acquired regularly (several times per day for a period of 3 months) for each EPFL student participating in the program in order to quantify stress and strain level for each user. To this end, this information will be sent to the Be.care cloud system, where Be.care artificial intelligence system will compute the bio-digital signature and propose some simple solutions in coordination with CSS to improve the recovery or to modify the student’s daily habits. These modifications of daily habits will include, in coordination with CSS: sport or fitness activity, balneotherapy, massages, foot reflexology and especially changes in eating habits.
Finally, we will quantify the students’ stress and strain level during the whole duration of the study, propose some remedial means (especially activity/sport and eating advises) to have the best chance of having a healthy mind in a healthy body.