Healthy longevity is not about adding years to our lives, but about enabling older people to “be and do what they have reason to value” which supports their wellbeing.
The Healthy Longevity Centre (HLC) develops and facilitates innovative approaches to specifically support individual solutions for healthy ageing.
Discover
General recommendations might not suffice
A crucial component for a long and healthy life is the stabilization of an individual’s unique capabilities. Lifestyle significantly influences how we age; however, generic health advice encouraging the adoption of new healthy habits often falls short in effectiveness because it fails to take into account a person’s individual traits and their specific situational context. A health intervention that incorporates such personalized needs and contextual information can yield substantially higher intervention success rates.
To harness this potential, the Healthy Longevity Centre advocates for and supports the acquisition and use of data on the heterogeneity, complexity, and context-dependency of functional ability in older age to create paradigm-changing research that paves the way for healthy longevity.
With a financial boost from Velux Stiftung and matching funds from the University of Zurich, the Healthy Longevity Centre (HLC) has opened its doors in April 2023.
Transfer
From research to innovation
Healthy ageing has been a strategic research focus at the University of Zurich (UZH) for several years. Together with the innovation cluster at the UZH Innovation Hub, the Healthy Longevity Centre offers a pipeline to transform research and innovation into inventions and entrepreneurship. As a catalyst, the UZH Innovation Hub accelerates the development of new inventions and ideas and strengthens the transfer of innovative research and teaching to the economy and society.
It is the combination of specialised expertise, research infrastructure with innovation management at the centre, that facilitate groundbreaking research and evidence-based innovations with societal impact.
Change
Data integration for new solutions
Science-based innovation relies on evidence and data to design and implement new solutions (e.g., concepts, processes, products, or organizational changes).
A novel infrastructure for data management and data analytics is a central component of the centre. The Healthy Longevity Analytics Lab enables individual data accounts and allows contributors to maintain ownership and complete control over their data usage. Contextualized real-life data can thereby complement and enrich population-level data, creating a more comprehensive and valuable data resource.
The unique infrastructure and analytical expertise facilitate collaboration between international experts from academia and industry that drive value-based health interventions.
Board of directors
“The centre’s focus – to provide real-time data on the heterogeneity and complexity of lifelong development – is unique worldwide.”
Impact
An ecosystem for societal impact
The Healthy Longevity Center draws its strength from several building blocks that combine disciplinary and thematic expertise with technological and analytical proficiency. In addition, it provides a novel infrastructure, coordination and support through several service units ranging from help with participant recruitment to innovation management. New service units will be established in areas such as legislation and policy or test-bed development. Together these building blocks form the Healthy Longevity Ecosystem.
Research alone might not be enough, but the combination with a supportive environment will enable relevant outcomes that have an impact on society.
Why we funded this project
“We were convinced by the centre’s vision: to harness the latest research findings for innovation by bringing research and the private sector closer so that mutual exchange can translate into interventions that offer society a good quality of life in old age.”
Foundation Board
Velux Stiftung
