The App 'Mit Liv – Min Sundhed': Supporting Vulnerable Citizens in Living Healthier Lives

To answer that question, the Diabetes Association, Steno Diabetes Centre Odense, three municipalities (Ærø, Svendborg, and Faaborg-Midtfyn), Health Innovation Centre of Southern Denmark, and Makeable collaborated to develop a user-friendly app.

Inspiration and Support for Vulnerable Citizens

The primary target group of the app is vulnerable citizens in municipal support programs. It focuses on increasing self‑care and supporting behavioural changes, while also facilitating the collaboration between the citizen and professionals as a tool for dialogue.

Maria Sahl, Department Manager at Svendborg Municipality, shares her thoughts on the app:

“It is a fantastic app. It provides an overview, keeps me on track with my personal commitments, and motivates me to make the right choices so that I can live a healthy life”.

Supporting a Healthy Lifestyle

In short, the app helps citizens plan and live a healthy everyday life through engaging and appealing features and content. The content in the app is presented visually, with videos, drawings, and images replacing text. It contains four focus areas:

• My Day: Here the citizen can plan and view the activities of the day and keep track of meals and fluid intake. The user inputs activities into the app, which can also serve as reminders for medication and appointments with doctors or other professionals.
• My Body: This section provides inspiration and help with grocery shopping and meal preparation. The citizen can follow one-on-one instructions for daily exercise and perform the exercise together with the instructor.
• Network: This section displays the citizen’s current and upcoming events, such as community centres, cooking classes and walks. Dates and times can be added to the “My Day” section for convenience.
• Thoughts: This section is about ‘mental fitness.’ The citizen can access knowledge and information about common challenges and exercises to improve mental health.

Customisation of the app

Under the 'more' section, citizens can customize the content to meet their specific needs. This feature allows the app to cater to additional target groups, such as citizens with heart disease or type 2 diabetes.

Carsten Jensen, Project Manager at the Health Innovation Centre of Southern Denmark, explains: 

“We have developed and designed a solution aimed at vulnerable citizens. But by using health segments, we can now add new content tailored to additional target groups. The app adapts in real time when a health segment is selected, so that the content follows the choices made by the user”

The Digital Diabetes Project

The app is part of the Digital Diabetes Project, aimed at developing and testing a digital solution to improve type 2 diabetes management and encourage lifestyle changes among vulnerable citizens in municipal support programs.

Municipalities are experiencing increased complexity in the interaction between mental and physical health issues. This applies, for example, to citizens who participate in municipal support programs due to reduced physical or mental functioning or specific social challenges. In such cases, educational or support efforts are often deprioritized in favor of addressing more immediate health issues.

Digital initiatives enable new forms of collaboration where treatment and support are not dependent on physical presence. Across the somatic and psychiatric fields, there is ongoing work to develop health technological and telepsychiatry solutions to support self‑care and treatment. 

The partnership behind this project has developed a digital education for citizens with type 2 diabetes, demonstrating that the opportunities offered by a digital setup appeal to a broad target group, regardless of gender, educational level, etc.

However, there remains limited knowledge about how digital initiatives can effectively support disease management among vulnerable citizens with type 2 diabetes:

“We see great potential in interdisciplinary and cross‐sector digital solutions to support the management of, for example, type 2 diabetes and help with lifestyle changes among various target groups”, states Carsten Jensen, Project Manager from Health Innovation Centre of Southern Denmark.

Partners

• The Diabetes Association
• Steno Diabetes Centre Odense
• Ærø, Svendborg, Assens, and Faaborg‑Midtfyn Municipality
• Makeable