Health & Well-Being
Background to the Research Field
Health and well-being are more than the absence of illness. The World Health Organization describes health as a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, emphasizing that these dimensions interact in everyday functioning and quality of life. Well-being itself is often framed as a positive resource for daily life, shaped not only by individual factors but also by social, economic, and environmental conditions.
In sport and movement related contexts, health and well-being are dynamic processes that evolve across training, competition, work, and everyday life. Physical activity can promote physical fitness, cognitive functioning, and emotional stability, but it also introduces physical load, psychological pressure, and recovery demands. Whether individuals benefit from these demands or experience overload depends on how stress, regeneration, and support systems are balanced over time. From youth athletes to older adults, maintaining this balance is essential for sustained performance, participation, and quality of life.
The importance of well-being extends across many areas of society. The same mechanisms that support resilience, motivation, and recovery in high-performance settings, such as elite sports, are relevant in clinical, educational, and public health contexts. Understanding how people respond to stressors, adapt to physical and mental challenges, and regain functional capacity after setbacks is therefore central to promoting long term health and autonomy across the lifespan.
Projects within the Research Field
The development of the Up&Go App is one of the projects within the field of health and well-being. This project focuses on a digital self‑assessment tool for mobility monitoring and fall prevention in older adults. From around the age of 60, age‑related declines in strength and balance increase the risk of falls, while structured mobility assessments are rarely performed on a regular basis in everyday settings. To address this gap, the Up&Go App translates the widely established Timed Up and Go test into an easy‑to‑use smartphone application that enables early risk detection at home. Using the phone’s built‑in motion sensors, movement data are recorded during repeated test trials and analyzed via an automated algorithm. Validation studies have demonstrated excellent concurrent validity and test–retest reliability compared with a medically certified reference system. In the long term, this project aims to make evidence‑based mobility assessment accessible, scalable, and suitable for real‑world use, thereby supporting autonomy and health in older age.
Another project within this research field is the mental fitness program Cope4Growth which focuses on stress competence in university students. Developed and implemented in collaboration with partner universities, Cope4Growth transfers evidence‑based strategies from applied sport psychology into higher education, with the goal of strengthening functional coping and resilience in student populations. Delivered as an interactive teaching format, the program helps students identify typical academic stressors, reflect on their habitual coping behaviors, and develop practical strategies to manage pressure more effectively. The overarching aim is preventive: promoting mental well‑being and psychological resources within university settings before chronic stress leads to health impairments, disengagement, or study dropout.
In the Helix-Arena project on innovative rehabilitation after stroke, conducted in collaboration with the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim and the Schmieder Clinics in Heidelberg, we explore a novel approach to cognitive and motor recovery. Traditional cognitive rehabilitation is often limited to computer-based exercises, which can be monotonous and only partially reflective of everyday demands. The Helix-Arena offers a more engaging and holistic alternative by providing an immersive, near-real-world training environment without requiring patients to wear VR headsets. Training tasks encourage head and body movements and thus target cognitive functions, motor skills, and balance simultaneously. A key observation concerns the potential positive influence on general affect, or mood, which is a critical factor in the rehabilitation process. Results from both healthy participants and stroke patients show promising trends in improving attention and affect, highlighting the potential of this approach for translational neurorehabilitation.
Our Head Impact Project addresses brain health and the monitoring of repetitive head impacts in youth elite soccer. Heading the ball is a fundamental component of the game, yet repeated head impacts have been linked in some studies to long-term alterations in cognitive, psychological, and motor functioning. Adopting a longitudinal, practice-oriented perspective, this project tracks athletes across training and competition and combines periodic screenings – including symptom questionnaires, cognitive tests, soccer-specific performance measures, and neurophysiological assessments – to characterize trajectories over time. All training and match sessions are video-recorded, and trained raters apply a standardized protocol to identify and classify head impacts, as current automated detection remains insufficient for applied use. Ongoing analyses aim to generate evidence-based guidance for heading practice, risk management, and the handling of repetitive head impacts in youth football, with the overarching goal of balancing player development with brain health and long-term well-being.
