Sitting at a desk all day, travelling from customer to customer in a car or transporting passengers safely from A to B on buses and trams - movement is often neglected in everyday working life. The Hochschule Niederrhein's Faculty of Health Care is therefore working on the "ActivitySnippets" project to create movement snippets that make the job more active and therefore healthier.
In fact, NRW is the front-runner in Germany when it comes to sitting time at work: employees spend an average of ten hours a day sitting, according to Dr Lukas Streese, academic staff member in the Therapy Sciences department at HSNR. "Physical inactivity is widespread in Germany and is a decisive factor in the development of diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, muscle and joint complaints. What's more, even short bursts of activity can significantly reduce the risk of non-communicable diseases."
This is exactly where the "Activity Snippets" come in: Streese's team developed a toolbox with various short and practical exercises to increase physical activity and mobility and reduce stress, which can be incorporated into any working day. Employees at Stadtwerke Krefeld (SWK) are testing how well this works in practice. "The aim of the project is for the exercises to be designed in such a way that they can be permanently incorporated into everyday working life and thus improve health in the long term," says Lukas Streese. That's why the next step is to look closely at SWK's bus and tram drivers: Around 60 employees will use the movement snippets over a period of 16 weeks. "Before and after this period, we will record their physical activity, strength and endurance levels in order to analyse the effectiveness of the activity snippets," says Streese.
Overall, ActivitySnippets is intended to be a building block for the development of a more active and therefore healthier society with the potential to be extended to other inactive occupational groups. To present the project, employees from the Faculty of Health Care recently travelled to Hamburg for the Sports, Medicine and Health Summit 2025. At the annual congress of the German Society for Sports Medicine and Prevention, everything revolved around the topic of health and promoting physical activity.
The project is being sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space with 179,000 euros for 18 months until spring 2026.
