RSU hosts annual meeting of EnRICH-HABITS: citizen science, data, and community at the heart of European health research

Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) welcomed its international research partners for the annual meeting of the EnRICH-HABITS project in May 2026. Held at the RSU Anatomy Museum the two-day gathering brought together research teams from four universities across three countries: the University Medical Center Groningen and Hanze University of Applied Sciences (both from the Netherlands), the University of Southern Denmark, and RSU representing Latvia.

Holding the project's consortium meeting in person gave partners a valuable opportunity for having open discussions, engaging in honest reflection, and carrying out strategic planning for the project's final year. 

What is EnRICH-HABITS? 

EnRICH-HABITS or ‘EmpoweRIng Citizens to adopt Healthy lifestyle Habits: A data-enaBled communIty-based ciTizen Science approach’ is a pan-European research project running from May 2024 to April 2027. 

At its core, EnRICH-HABITS asks questions about how to empower communities in need of healthier dietary and physical activity habits? The answer the project pursues is not a top-down intervention, but a fundamentally collaborative one, rooted in citizen science: the active involvement of community members means they are not merely research subjects, but rather co-creators of the solutions.

What is the data telling us?

A significant strand of the project's work involves population-level data analysis to map where the risks are highest. The team has made progress in identifying geographic and demographic risk regions associated with poor dietary and physical activity habits. New models are being developed to capture the underlying drivers of unhealthy lifestyles – a complex challenge that goes well beyond individual behavior to encompass environment, infrastructure, and social context. No definitive model has yet emerged, and the consortium is clear-eyed about that: the research continues, and the complexity is itself an important finding.

Citizen science in practice: what the researchers have learned

Perhaps the richest discussions at the Riga meeting centered on what the three partner countries have learned from applying citizen science on the ground. Across the Netherlands, Denmark, and Latvia, teams have been working directly with local communities. The lessons have been illuminating, sometimes surprising, and occasionally humbling.

Recruitment alone, the process of bringing citizens into the research as active participants, has proven far more nuanced than any framework can fully anticipate. Different approaches have been tested, with varying results. Some worked well; others did not. Context matters enormously: the strength of existing community networks, the trust between residents and institutions, and the specific history of a neighborhood. What the experience across all three countries confirms is that citizen science demands a genuinely versatile, flexible, and persistent approach. The theoretical framework provides scaffolding, but every community requires its own tailored application.

What has also become increasingly clear is that this is not a weakness of the method – it is its defining strength. Solutions built with communities are solutions communities can actually use.

Building the next generation of researchers

Looking beyond the project's immediate outputs, the consortium is developing a set of educational resources – PhD and master's level courses – that translate the project's interdisciplinary approaches into teachable content. Planned course modules include:

• Public health challenges and socio-ecological influences;
• Understanding unhealthy risk profiles in communities;
• Citizen science data collection and community involvement;
• Co-creation for healthy behaviour change;
• Monitoring process and outcomes;
• Communication strategies for health promotion and engagement.

This three-year project received funding from ZonMw, Innovation Fund Denmark, the Latvian Council of Science under the umbrella of the Partnership Fostering a European Research Area for Health (ERA4Health) (GA N° 101095426 of the EU Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme).