Wellness Circle

The Wellness Circle app was co-created with Indigenous Elders, Knowledge Holders, scholars, and community members to support culturally safe health promotion grounded in the Medicine Wheel framework.

The development of the Wellness Circle app builds on more than a decade of collaborative Indigenous health and digital design research. In 2011, Dr. Shannon Bredin and Dr. Darren Warburton received a grant from the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems (MITACS) - Networks of Centres of Excellence entitled "Novel web and smart-phone based health applications.” Further funding was received in 2014 from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) for the project “Addressing the burden of cardiometabolic disease in Aboriginal Peoples through culturally appropriate interaction design,” led by Drs. Bredin and Warburton in partnership with Jonathan Aitken (Emily Carr University of Art + Design). This collective work brought together Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, trainees, artists, designers, and First Nations community partners to explore culturally grounded approaches to digital wellness tools.

Building on this foundation, a second CIHR-funded project in 2015 entitled “Optimizing the transfer and uptake of evidence-based and culturally appropriate healthy lifestyle information in Aboriginal communities” expanded the collaboration to include Drs. Heather Foulds, Paul Oh, and Sheldon Tobe. Through this early work, the team co-created a design process book and developed the initial Healing Circle app, created by trainees and collaborators from Emily Carr University and the Indigenous Health & Physical Activity Program at the University of British Columbia. The early Healing Circle prototype subsequently evolved through continued community engagement and design refinement into the current Wellness Circle app platform.

In 2017, Dr. Rosalin Miles formally joined the team, which greatly strengthened our First Nations leadership and community engagement within the project. The team subsequently secured support from the National Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund in 2018 through the project “Strengthening Indigenous Education Approaches to Health and Wellness.” This initiative involved Drs. Warburton, Bredin, and Miles, alongside Elder Gail Sparrow, Dr. Jan Hare, and Dr. Moss Norman. This funding supported the development and completion of the current digital platform that serves as the foundation of the Wellness Circle app now available online.

The Wellness Circle digital platform was developed through a long-standing collaboration between the Indigenous Health & Physical Activity Program at the University of British Columbia, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, the Indigenous Physical Activity and Cultural Circle, the Health & Fitness Society of BC, First Nations Elders and Knowledge Holders, and community partners, with leadership from Drs. Darren Warburton, Shannon Bredin, and Rosalin Miles and technical development contributions from collaborators including Jonathan Aitken and Rick Conroy. Funding for this work was provided by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the National Indian Brotherhood Trust Fund, and the Indigenous Health & Physical Activity Program (UBC).