Finland
I’m driven by a desire to improve people’s daily lives and to find better solutions to societal challenges. My research combines high scientific quality with real-world impact. I believe prevention is the foundation of a sustainable healthcare system — and achieving it requires interdisciplinary collaboration. My areas of expertise include the physiological mechanisms of prolonged sitting, technologies for measuring and analyzing physical activity, and randomized intervention studies across age groups — particularly among individuals with type 2 diabetes.
The Preventive Health Research Unit builds upon and expands the applied research legacy of the Active Life Lab, with a sharpened focus on scalable, non-pharmacological interventions for mental health and type 2 diabetes. Meanwhile, the Active Life Laboratory continues to serve as the dedicated infrastructure and innovation environment supporting this work.
Acting Director of Juvenia – Youth Research and Development Centre alongside my main role as Director of Active Life Lab
See what Fibion is about: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7hKd313m9Ps Fibion Inc. is focused on developing and selling products and services for assessment of physical inactivity and activity. Our customers are advanced personal trainers, fitness, wellness, and rehabilitation centers, occupational healthcare providers, and weight management consultants, and other professionals interested in accurate monitoring of everyday health impacts. Our end-customers are individuals and organisations interested in improving health and wellbeing by changing inactivity and everyday activity behaviours. The flagship product of the company is Fibion, a novel tool for personal trainers and other health and fitness professionals to assess the everyday sitting and physical activity routines of their customers.
A daily life of modern people is characterized by large amounts of sedentary time with relatively idle muscles. The other dominating part, non-exercise activity, is abundant and affected by biological, behavioral and environmental factors. Most importantly, these factors are likely various and different compared to factors related to exercise behavior. Recent research evidence has indicated sedentary time to be detrimentally associated with health outcomes independent of meeting exercise guidelines. Given the population level decrease in total physical activity level, the associations between the most dominant components of physical activity pattern and health outcomes need to be understood in greater detail for effective prevention. Currently, most of the evidence about health hazards of sedentary behavior are based on cross-sectional and prospective research justifying the need for sedentary-time targeted interventions with objective measures of the primary outcomes. The aims of my PhD project are: - To develop new methods to assess everyday physical activity and sedentary habits. The focus is especially in measuring muscular activities by EMG, because of their causal role on metabolic changes. - To map the associations between the muscular inactivity parameters and cardio-metabolic outcomes. - To test the feasibility and effectiveness of sedentary-time targeted behavioral intervention among office workers. - To clarify the causal role of reduced muscular inactivity on cardio-metabolic outcomes.