In 25th and 26th of October 2019, three researchers from ciTechCare participated in the Jornadas de Avaliação e Prescrição em Exercício para a Saúde – an event organized by the School of Education and Social Sciences (ESECS) of the Polytechnic of Leiria. Maria Guarino chaired the first panel of oral communications, where Joana Cruz presented the project “OnTRACK – On Time to Rethink ACtivity Knowledge: a personalized mHealth coaching platform to tackle physical inactivity in COPD” and Rui Fonseca-Pinto presented the project “MOVIDA – Physical activity monitoring platform”.

Joana Cruz presented 3 posters on the topic of physical activity promotion in COPD (2 of them part of the OnTRACK project) at the European Respiratory Society (ERS) Congress 2019, held in Madrid from September 28 to October 2. Two of the posters were presented in Thematic Poster sessions and 1 in a Poster Discussion session. She was also invited to a Chair of one of the Thematic Poster sessions in this event, which is one of the most prestigious congresses in the respiratory field.

Rui Fonseca-Pinto was invited to participate in the workshop Villages on Move (VoM) to talk about the MOVIDA.polis project. VoM is an Erasmus + project aiming to share ideas to promote every day physical activity. Collected ideas are developed by means of culture of experimentation, to activate inhabitants in rural areas to have more movement and more joy of sports.

In the last 18th of September, at Évora, the health care and school professional supporting manual entitled “Crianças e Jovens com Diabetes Tipo I na Escola – Manual de Apoio aos Profissionais de Saúde e Educação” was released, together with two videos developed by a joint working group in which ciTechCare researchers Maria dos Anjos Dixe and Eva Menino were included. The researcher Eva Menino is also an author of one chapter of the manual. This initiative aimed to promote health literacy in the school community. The videos were presented by the Directorate-General for Health (DGS) supported by the National Diabetes Program integrated on the Health

The Sociedade Artística Musical de Pousos (SAMP, Leiria), in partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, will receive 40.600€ to support a project which aims to improve the quality of life of people with chronic pain (i.e., patients with cancer, depression and other pathologies) using music therapy. The project entitled ‘Music Therapy for people with chronic pain’ (Musicoterapia com Pessoas com Dor Crónica) was one of the 25 projects funded by the Prémio BPI “la Caixa” Solidário 2019. This project was based on a project that is already running but with limited resources. This grant will enable the institution to maintain the project running autonomously for

The CBmeter project won second place in the national competition of Poliempreende. Poliempreende is an activity organized by the network of higher education institutions. This initiative aims, through a competition of ideas and business plans, to evaluate and reward projects developed and presented by students, graduates or professors of these institutions.