The shape of the trial
Who takes part, and who stands behind it
Participants
- ✓300–500 residents of Palma and Calvià, recruited through GPs, gyms and town-hall channels.
- ✓Two groups: an exercise group (new members of gyms, walking and training programmes) and, ideally, a comparison group who do not change their habits.
- ✓All activity counts — a daily walk and a weights session carry equal scientific interest. Inclusivity is the point.
- ✓Every participant consents under GDPR; all analysis uses anonymised codes, never names.
The consortium
- 1Promoter — the project’s legal entity, coordinating partners and grant applications.
- 2Ayuntamientos of Palma & Calvià — civic endorsement, venues, communication channels.
- 3Gym & fitness operators — delivery of programmes and attendance data.
- 4UIB (university) — scientific design and independent evaluation.
- 5IB-Salut & primary care — medical referrals and credibility.
- 6FNEID — the national federation already campaigning on VAT; our natural ally in Madrid.
The roadmap
From first meeting to evidence dossier
Form the consortium
Confirm the legal entity, sign partners, open conversations with IB-Salut, both ayuntamientos and the Govern’s EU funds office. Engage a GDPR specialist from day one.
Funding applications
Submit the Erasmus+ Sport application; begin preparation of the larger EU4Health / Horizon bid with UIB as scientific partner.
Build & recruit
Version 1 of the monitoring app goes live. Recruitment opens through GPs, gyms and municipal channels. Every participant completes the baseline assessment at enrolment.
Run the pilot
Monthly 3-minute app check-ins; full re-assessment at months 3, 6 and 12. Interim results published at the 6-month mark to keep political momentum.
Present the dossier
The pilot’s data, the Catalan €1→€50 figure, the EU court ruling and FNEID’s national campaign combine into a formal proposal to the Govern Balear — and through it, to Madrid: restore the 10% rate.
Why GP involvement is non-negotiable
The single design choice that most changes how government reads this project is medical referral. With primary care involved, Active Balears is a public-health pilot producing clinical-adjacent evidence. Without it, it risks being read as industry-funded marketing. Months 0–2 are therefore mostly about one relationship: IB-Salut.
The measurement schedule
Exactly what is collected, and when
- Consent & demographics
- All physical measures, taken by trained staff
- Full questionnaire set (EQ-5D, IPAQ, WHO-5, PHQ-9/GAD-7)
- Healthcare-use recall: last 3 months
- Track assignment with the link worker
- Mood, energy, sleep (1–10 sliders)
- Doctor visit this month? Medication change? Sick days?
- One optional free-text line: “anything to tell us?”
- Push reminder; link worker calls after two missed check-ins
- Physical measures re-taken
- Full questionnaire set repeated
- Healthcare-use recall refreshed
- Month 6 doubles as the interim-results cut
- Gym check-ins from partner systems
- Step counts via Apple Health / Google Fit (opt-in)
- Walking-group attendance logged by leaders
Why these instruments: EQ-5D produces the quality-of-life values used in official cost-effectiveness analysis across Europe — it is the bridge from “I feel better” to “this saves the health system money.” IPAQ, WHO-5 and PHQ-9/GAD-7 are free, validated in Spanish, and short enough that people actually finish them.
Privacy by design
GDPR and ethics, done properly from day one
- ✓Legal basis: explicit informed consent for health-data processing (GDPR Art. 9), with scientific research safeguards. Participants can withdraw — and have their data deleted — at any time, in the app, in one tap.
- ✓Anonymisation: names live only in a separate, encrypted enrolment record held by the DPO. Everything researchers touch carries only the participant code.
- ✓DPIA before launch: a formal data-protection impact assessment — mandatory for health data at this scale — reviewed by the DPO and shared with institutional partners.
- ✓Ethics approval: the scientific committee submits the protocol to the Balearic research ethics committee (CEI-IB) before any participant is enrolled — the stamp that makes results publishable.
- ✓Data residency: all personal data on EU-hosted, certified research infrastructure. No transfers outside the EU, ever.
- !Why this section is this long: privacy is the first question every institutional partner asks and the one risk that could end the project. Answering it before being asked is itself a credibility strategy.
Building the app
Three phases, no wasted software
REDCap-based, branded front end
Enrolment, assessments and monthly check-ins on REDCap — the free platform built for exactly this kind of health study, GDPR-ready and trusted by ethics committees. A simple branded web app wraps it so participants see “Active Balears,” not a research tool. Weeks to deploy, not months.
Activity sync & dashboard
Opt-in step-count sync from Apple Health / Google Fit, gym check-in feeds from partner systems, and a live dashboard for the operations team: recruitment, retention and check-in rates per track, per municipality — the early-warning system for drop-out.
Custom native app
If EU4Health/Horizon funding lands and the pilot expands, then — and only then — a custom native app is justified: richer engagement features, multi-region support, integration with receta deportiva referral systems. The pilot’s data model transfers unchanged.
From data to dossier
The analysis plan, pre-registered
- 1Before-and-after: each participant’s month-0 versus month-12 scores — wellbeing, activity, physical measures, healthcare use. The headline chart.
- 2Against the comparison group: the same changes measured against people who didn’t join — the answer to “wouldn’t they have improved anyway?”
- 3Dose-response: do people who attended more improve more? If yes, the causal story strengthens dramatically.
- 4Economic translation: EQ-5D changes converted to quality-adjusted life years and avoided healthcare costs, plugged into the Catalan €1→€50 framework with Balearic numbers.
- 5Pre-registration: the full plan is published before results exist, so no one can claim we fished for favourable findings.
- ✓The output: one peer-reviewable paper, one plain-language dossier for the Govern, one open anonymised dataset — three formats, one body of evidence.