Citizen’s empowerment in healthcare is “a social process of recognizing, promoting and enhancing people’s abilities to meet their own needs, solve their own problems and mobilize the necessary resources in order to feel in control of their own lives” as much as possible. Citizen science in the Health and Well-being area of Open Data has the power to provide both large scale data on health and activity indicators to health service providers and policy-makers and a sense of community and solidarity to individuals in the pursuit of a more health and activity focussed lifestyle.

While healthcare is a vital public service for any society and well-being is complex, multi-faceted and both personal and societal, information on what services is available to public may be fragmented and difficult to find. People are not only interested in acute and primary care services, but also in amenities that promote health and fitness, both physical and mental. These can include sports and recreation amenities, community groups, local clubs, cultural activities. To address this gap, the Hale & Hearty Action, a two-year project proposed, and led by the Irish Government and funded by the European Commission’s Innovation and Networks Executive Agency is creating a cohesive knowledge base, designing a dashboard to query this data and a web app to both access the data and input individual's anonymised data. The project is aligned closely with the revised EU Directive on Open Data and the Re-Use of Public Sector Information.

New Zealand has integrated wellbeing into the policy making process by requiring well-being data and analysis to be used at each stage of the budget process including setting priorities, analysing proposals and making high-level trade-offs.  This approach offers the potential for better alignment from personal to local to national, fostering alignment and more efficient and potentially innovative engagement between private facilities and local and national government.

The Irish Government has recognised the value of health and well-being promotion and the Healthy Ireland initiative takes a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to tackling the major lifestyle issues that lead to negative health outcomes. This framework aims to shift the focus to prevention, seeks to reduce health inequalities, and emphasizes the need to empower people and communities to better look after their own health and well-being.

The Hale & Hearty project fits it with this policy as it improves citizen’s access to health and wellbeing information (e.g. activities near where people live, where and when local clubs meet, the best places to go for a walk). It also will develop and make freely available a health and wellbeing Knowledge Base that allows 1) information being more accessible to the public to use to improve their own health and wellbeing, and to see it in the context of their personal health information and activities and 2) data managers to provide additional context to health statistics and to drive health and wellbeing initiatives.

Results of this project include a health and wellbeing Knowledge Base and health and wellbeing web application (maps, graphs and information) that will demonstrate potential uses for the knowledge base. The project will also provide health and wellbeing related information to individuals in a personal context and in relation to their locality and to others of a similar lifestyle.