NatureLab: Developing nature-based wellbeing services

People are more and more interested in how nature affects their health and wellbeing. This can be utilized in travel, recreational, care, and rehabilitation services in several ways. Investigating wellbeing impacts of nature environment is a broad field where Natural Resources Institute Finland (Luke) has acted as a Finnish forerunner.

The well-being effects of nature

Luke’s applied research and diverse know-how enable planning and implementing research aiming for wellbeing impacts. Furthermore, various services can be developed on top of these research settings.

Collaborating with Luke enables a research-ground way of developing nature-based wellbeing services. By virtue of research & development the customer can maximize the benefits of its service, as well as improve the service’s impact.

Developing nature based services

The service portfolio is customized to meet the customer’s needs. The objective is to provide the customer with tailored information of wellbeing impacts and application areas of nature or virtual nature. Existing research results can be complemented with new information, which is found out during the project. The customer can choose the project scope, ranging from desktop study on existing research results all the way to designing and implementing a full-blown operating environment, and studying its impacts.

Examples of Luke’s expert services include:

• Collecting existing research results for kickstarting the planning process
• Planning assistance by Luke’s expert for utilizing the impacts of natural environments in the customer’s context
  • An example service package: literature review and two days of planning assistance by the expert
• The process of developing a service or virtual nature application:
  • Evaluating various content options
  • User testing: co-creation and further development with the customer
  • Planning the impact evaluation criteria (e.g., Firstbeat or Linkura)
• Implementing a broader impact research (e.g., as a joint project)

The portfolio can include for example a service development process based on literature review. At the end of such process the wellbeing impacts of the implemented service are evaluated according to the selected criteria.

Nature supporting well-being – Why to choose Luke?

Our continuous research and broad professional networks bring the latest findings at your disposal. We are a recognized pioneer in investigating the wellbeing effects of nature. We are the first research institute in Finland to have studied virtual nature’s impact on recovering from workload. We have conducted physiological measurements to verify this.

We have our own virtual nature environment which we utilize in developing services and testing them in action. Furthermore, we are networked with a number of partners for building virtual nature environments.

Contact our experts and ask us more!