RecycleHealth

UPDATE March 1st, 2017: Thank you so much to all who have donated to our February campaign! We greatly appreciate your support and look forward to updating you with our progress. If you missed the opportunity to donate to this crowdfunding but are still interested in supporting us, you can give online or contact Lisa Gualtieri directly at lisa.gualtieri@tufts.edu. Thank you!

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"Many people who can benefit most from wearable activity trackers cannot afford them. Our goal is to provide trackers to people who may benefit most, including older adults with chronic disease, veterans, and more, and through research, to learn how to better help people increase their physical fitness."

The above quote from RecycleHealth founder, Dr. Lisa Gualtieri, is at the heart of what we believe in. And RecycleHealth needs your support to help bring health and fitness to those who need it most.

Through the hard work of Dr. Gualtieri, aided by a part-time staff member, a physician, and student volunteers, RecycleHealth has successfully received over 1,000 wearable donations and is currently conducting its third research study! However, running RecycleHealth requires more than just trackers. More staffing, mailing labels, packaging, promotion, recruitment materials… the list goes on! We need your help to keep RecycleHealth running at its best, so we can help as many people as we possibly can.

RecycleHealth was founded based on the idea that wearable activity trackers are usually purchased by younger, healthier, and wealthier demographics, who upgrade to new devices and toss their old ones in a drawer.  Dr. Gualtieri started RecycleHealth as a means of collecting those abandoned trackers, refurbishing them, and giving them to the people least likely to buy them, thereby serving the dual purpose of helping the environment and helping those in need.

In addition to providing trackers, we conduct research with different populations, such as older adults with Hypertension or Type II Diabetes, to learn more about how wearables affect behavior change and clinical outcomes.

So what's next for RecycleHealth? We have two goals in mind! First, we want to learn more about how wearable activity tracker data can be used in clinical visits, so physicians can offer actionable counseling. Second, we are very interested to see if RecycleHealth can assist veterans recovering from mental health and other concerns by using trackers as a part of their therapy.

With your support, we can run more studies, reach more people in need, and get trackers to people quicker. Donate today to help RecycleHealth reach its goal of bringing fit to those who need it, and help us to #ShareTheHealth.

Visit RecycleHealth.com to learn more!