A new wellness project planned by the Stanford Prevention Research Center is set to launch in 2015 and will focus on wellness rather than disease – under the hypothesis that promoting wellness thwarts disease.

An unrestricted gift to Stanford University of US$10m (€7.8m, £6m) was given by Amway’s Nutrilite Health Institute Wellness Fund to back the project that will be called WELL, which stands for Wellness Living Laboratory.

WELL is entirely unrelated to the Delos and Mayo Clinic tie-up to create a Wellness Living Laboratory that examines the wellness aspects of built environments and will test products.

Led by John Ioannidis, head of the Stanford Prevention Research Center, WELL will recruit thousands of volunteers – dubbed “citizen scientists by Ioannidis – in two initial locations: Santa Clara County, California, and in China. Participants will track and report health factors remotely using a range of new technologies in an effort to define health. There are also plans to expand recruitment of volunteers to other global sites.

Volunteers will be able to take part in a variety of clinical trials and interventions, such as nutrition counselling or smoking cessation programmes.