Digital health app Holly Health has partnered with Age UK Lewisham and Southwark and leading national and community services to provide mental and physical health coaching for people aged 50-70+ across the UK.
The app, developed in collaboration with users, supports 50-70+ year-olds by offering them personalised coaching for their mental and physical health.
With 24/7 access to digital coaching, educational videos, and health habit monitoring, users can receive continuous guidance and motivation to enhance their physical activity, mindfulness, and lifestyle behaviours.
By partnering with organisations, adults across the UK will have a year of free access to Holly Health to digitally manage their health. This new initiative, combined with Holly Health’s continued collaboration with GP surgeries worldwide, extends the reach of its services across the nation.
The national launch of Holly Health’s healthy ageing service follows a successful 12-week pilot, where over 90% of users developed new health habits.
Grace Gimson, CEO at Holly Health, said: “The Healthy Ageing project has been a brilliant opportunity for us to work directly with users to improve the service together, enhancing the accessibility and personalised coaching of Holly Health for healthy ageing.
“We’ve been able to see the tangible benefits of this co-design paying off in our overwhelmingly positive pilot outcomes and are looking forward to taking this further with the partnerships we’ve formed. We aim to help many thousands of people with healthy ageing in the years to come and this is just the beginning.”
The 12-week pilot, which involved 36 participants and was conducted in partnership with Age UK Lewisham and Southwark, found 93% of participants reported to be carrying out new healthy habits automatically.
It also found that 89% of participants planned to continue using Holly Health after completing the pilot and 94% stated they would recommend using the app to a friend or family member.
A Holly Health user said: “It’s just a really, really empathetic tool. I think that it encourages you to care about yourself and not to beat yourself up – which is what I’ve done for probably 50-odd years really, and that doesn’t work.”
CEO at Age UK Lewisham and Southwark, Ross Diamond, added: “Age UK Lewisham and Southwark has been delighted to collaborate with our friends at Holly Health who are developing their health and wellbeing app to make this more accessible and relevant for older users.
“The app offers a digital approach to healthy ageing which complements the work that we do in the community – empowering older people to manage their health and wellbeing in a supportive, realistic and fun way.
“We are proud of the way that the voices of older people have helped reshape the tool to improve how it is accessed and what it contains, and we are excited to see how the rest of the world responds.”
Increasing self-empowerment and prevention of chronic disease in the over 50’s and encouraging them to take responsibility for their own health is also the goal of an initiative that Sir Muir Gray, an advisor to Public Health England recently helped to launch.