People in their sixties are now being monitored in a new way – the Kohortti1966 mobile app was developed together with users

What should be considered to ensure that a new mobile application designed for everyday monitoring of health and wellbeing is user-friendly, useful and engaging? What kinds of content should the app include? What features should be incorporated into the app? How should the app and its adoption process consider different types of users?

These themes have been addressed in the Stay Healthy Through Ageing (STAGE) project, coordinated by the University of Oulu and funded by the European Union. In the project, the Kohortti1966 app for monitoring health and wellbeing has been developed in collaboration with clinicians, researchers, citizens and members of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. The app will be used to monitor the health and wellbeing of cohort members turning 60 over a period of two years.

Co-creation enables a genuinely user-driven health app

The starting point of co-creation is to enable the active and equal participation of people from different backgrounds, valuing all information brought forward and using creative methods to understand and resolve potential challenges (Grindell et al. 2022). The aim of co-creation is to promote the democratisation of decision-making and knowledge production, to empower citizens, and to improve the quality and user-centredness of the developed service (Kaisler & Missbach 2020; Rättilä et al. 2023).

The development of the Kohortti1966 app began in spring 2024 by exploring clinicians’ and researchers’ views on the app’s functional, content-related and ethical requirements, as well as the purposes for which the collected data would be used (Jarva et al. 2025). The results were used in defining the app’s requirements, after which preliminary content themes were drafted together with researchers involved in the cohort study, app developers and the STAGE project team in autumn 2024 and early 2025.

In spring 2025, three co-creation workshops were organised with citizens and cohort members aged 55–65 on the Kontinkangas campus of the University of Oulu. The workshops explored the age group’s wishes regarding the app’s content, features and willingness of use. In addition, the needs of different user profiles were identified, and challenges related to the adoption of the app and the data collection process were discussed.

The ideas and suggestions presented in the workshops were compiled for the app developers, and the development proposals were incorporated as comprehensively as possible to improve the app’s user-friendliness. In autumn 2024, the app’s use and usability were evaluated in a pilot study involving researchers, clinicians, citizens and cohort members.

Based on the feedback, the co-creation of the Kohortti1966 app was considered meaningful. The perspectives brought up particularly in the workshop activities enriched the discussion and reflection on using the app to track one’s own health and wellbeing.

The use of the Kohortti1966 app and the data collected through it – for example on the user’s physical activity, diet, memory, general wellbeing and daily routines – provide a unique opportunity to deepen the study of cohort members’ lifelong health and to increase understanding of the factors influencing healthy ageing. As data collection begins, the app’s use and users’ engagement will continue to be monitored.