"Wanderherz" HealthTrails

The project offering special hiking tours for people with and without heart trouble has been de-veloped by the Schüchtermann-Klinik in cooperation with an association of partners consist-ing of the center of excellence Gesundheitswirtschaft e.V. (GewiNet), the Kur- und Touristik GmbH Bad Rothenfelde, the Tourismusverband Osnabrücker Land, the Naturpark TERRA.vita as well as the Osnabrück University of Applied Sciences, the Osnabrück University and the Oldenburger Forschungs- und Entwicklungsinstitut für Informatik-Werkzeuge und -Systeme OFFIS e.V. (Institute for Information Technology).

The project's purpose is, among other things, to create an attractive combination of preventive health care and tourism. Accordingly, the HealthTrails product has been developed using tourist and medical components.

The HealthTrails are made up of nine hiking trails tested and evaluated according to sports sciences directives.Trained health hiking guides selected trails of different lengths and levels of difficulty and cate-gorised them for the individual hiker according to international standards.
These trails are to be used both by health-conscious ramblers and by cardiac groups as a pre-ventive and rehabilitative measure.

The evaluated trails have different profiles in terms of distance and difficulty and were grouped into four cardiac categories based on exercise physiological criteria.