BlueHealth gets going in Greece

Our team at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki has been busy over the last few months, designing a study to test the health impacts of a new urban waterfront.

Based at a recently regenerated site in Thessaloniki, Greece, the study will assess how people’s health and wellbeing is affected by spending time there during the working day.

The results from this group will then be compared with a second group who have normal working days but with no time allocated to visit the waterfront.

In need of participants, the BlueHealth team recently ran a recruitment drive for volunteers as part of the University’s “A.U.TH. on Sundays” events.

These sessions are filled with interactive presentations, workshops, games and experiments designed to showcase the latest advancements in environment and human health research.

As part of this year’s events, the BlueHealth project team ran a session about their research where visitors were given a short presentation and invited to take part in the study.

Ilias Frydas, a Molecular Virologist and lead researcher for the project, was delighted with the response and said:

“The interest we received from the public exceeded our expectations and we enrolled 45 volunteers in the study. We’ll be using molecular biology, analytical chemistry and behavioural questionnaires to fully evaluate how time spent at the waterfront affects people’s wellbeing. We’re really looking forward to starting the research and testing our theories.”

The study will shortly be entering the next phase of development, which you can stay up to date with on the Thessaloniki project page.