The MIT Media Lab, an interdisciplinary research facility, has launched a wellness initiative designed to spark innovation in the area of health and wellbeing, while promoting healthier workplace and lifestyle behaviours.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the US philanthropic health foundation, is providing a grant of US$1m (€800,000, £600,000) to fund the new initiative which will address the role of technology in shaping our health.

The initiative is an educational set of programmes focusing on prototyping tools and technologies that support physical, mental, social and emotional wellbeing.

In Q4 the “Tools for Well Being” course will take place, followed by “Health Change Lab” in Q2 of 2015. In addition to concept and technology development, these courses will feature seminars by experts who will address a wide range of topics related to wellness. For example, speakers will include Walter Willett, a physician and nutrition researcher; Chuck Czeisler, a physician and sleep scientist; Ben Sawyer, a game developer for health applications; Matthew Nock, an expert in suicide prevention; Dinesh John, a researcher on health sciences and workplace activity; and Martin Seligman, a founder of the field of positive psychology. These seminars will be open to the public and be made available online.

The RWJF grant will also support five graduate-level research fellows, enabling them to design, build and deploy novel tools to promote wellbeing and health behaviour change at the Media Lab.

Other aspects of the initiative include a monthly health challenge that will engage the entire lab in addition to pairing students with one another, to build awareness of wellbeing as a social function and not just a personal goal.

“Wellbeing is a very hard problem that has yet to be solved by psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, biologists or other experts in the scientific community,” said Rosalind Picard, a professor of media arts and sciences. “It’s time to bring MIT ingenuity to the challenge.”

“RWJF is working to build a culture of health in the US where all people have opportunities to make healthy choices and lead healthy lifestyles,” said Stephen Downs, chief technology and information officer at RWJF. “Technology has long shaped the patterns of everyday life, and it is these patterns – of how we work, eat, sleep, socialise, recreate and get from place to place – that largely determine our health. We’re excited to see the Media Lab turn its creative talents and its significant influence to the challenge of developing technologies that will make these patterns of everyday life more healthy.”