Biomedical Discussion Group Lecture - Dr. Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen and Dr.Olga Kulyk

“Persuasive Health Technology to Improve Health and Wellbeing”

Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen, PhD
Professor at the University of Twente in Persuasive Health Technology; Founder of the first Center for eHealth Research and Disease Management (www.ehealthresearchcenter.nl)

Olga Kulyk, PhD
Assistant Professor at the Persuasive Health Technology Lab, Center for eHealth, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

If you are interested in meeting with either Dr. van Gemert-Pijnen or Dr. Kulyk, please email CBB.

Event is FREE – please RSVP via EventBrite.
Coffee/cookies will be available

Abstract: [Poster]

High tech and Human touch, the profile of the University of Twente, converge in Persuasive Health Technology. Persuasive Health Technology emphasizes the design of empathic health technologies, adaptive to personalities and tailored to individual needs and skills, through mobile devices and ambient technologies, invisible and embedded in the environment that surrounds people. Persuasive technology provides methods and strategies to create trust, user-engagement and adherence via empathic and person-adaptive designs. It provides means for reinventing healthcare via co-creation with the end-users (caregivers, caretakers, family carers) and involvement of stakeholders (decision makers, policy makers and industrial organization). The ambition of Persuasive Health Technology research and education is to develop, implement and evaluate health technology that is feasible, trustworthy and user-friendly. The aim is to:

• Improve healthcare by increasing patient safety and reducing health risks via smart, tailored and personalized decision support systems.
• Improve readiness for independent aging and living. The aim is to contribute to a participative society by innovative and user-friendly technologies that are implementable in society. Patients and citizens can use care and assistance that is accessible, affordable and usable.
• Decrease the load on intramural care by supporting self-management, to extend current care with innovative concepts for healthy living.
• Contribute to quality of care through the use of digital information and communication technologies in primary and secondary processes.
• Contribute to protection and improvement of public health through the use of digital information and communication technologies.
• Establish an infrastructure via innovative Life Long Learning systems for implementation of eLearning-concepts in HealthCare (blended eLearning) and in Education (Massive Open Online Course, online Instructional technology). At the moment, such an approach is needed to improve knowledge dissemination and to realize readiness for Healthy living in practice.
• Strengthen the profile of Psychology, Health and Technology in tuition according to TOM, the new educational model of the University of Twente. In particular, to improve the skills and competencies in designing and evaluation of eHealth interventions. The potential of educational technologies such as eLearning, distant learning and blended learning will be explored to improve the efficiency and to widen the scope (UMCG, medical students; healthcare professionals).

These aims converge with the European ICT for Health programs (Horizon 2020; EU Policy for eHealth), the ambitions to bridge University of Waterloo with the University of Twente in the creation of a smart Health Network and with the visions of University of Twente and the faculty of Behavioural, Management & Social Sciences (Technology4People). To achieve these ambitions, in the upcoming years cooperation with health informatics and medical disciplines is indispensable. Position of Prof Dr. Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen at UMCG and Waterloo can be a driver for realizing these aims.

International Funding is important to facilitate the research and education ambitions. The ambition is to acquire funding from national, and international Grants (e.g., INTERREG; Horizon 2020 projects). In particular, the focus is on 3 research topics: User and Usage centered development methods; Persuasive designs for affection and adherence; and the Implementation strategies for adoption and integration in practice.

Their talk will focus on smart monitoring and coaching to prevent complications and to promote independent living and mobility (citizen centered safe and self-care). In particular, Dr. Olga Kulyk will talk about persuasive design for peripheral visualizations, awareness applications, affective feedback and evaluation methods for measuring situational awareness, group dynamics and persuasiveness. They will demonstrate their holistic iterative approach on the recent project examples, hoping to trigger fruitful discussion.

Biosketch:

Lisette van Gemert-Pijnen:
Dr. van Gemert-Pijnen studied psycho-linguistics (development of a language therapy for patients with mental disturbances, aphasia) and obtained her PhD in improving compliance with safe care protocols in Healthcare (e.g. MRSA, Hep. B). She is a professor at the University of Twente in Persuasive Health Technology with an appointments at the University Medical Center Groningen and the University of Waterloo (Canada). She is founder of the first Center for eHealth Research and Disease Management and her research and tuition focuses on persuasive designs to increase trust, engagement and adherence to technologies.

Dr. van Gemert-Pijnen collaborates with the University of Groningen (UMCG, EurSafetyHealth-net) and with RIVM (National Institute for Public Health and Environment) to foster Healthy Aging in healthcare and home care, and with the University of Toronto in PhD-projects about ePublic Health.  In Persuasive Technology she works with Prof Dr. H Oinas-Kukonen, from Oulu University, Finland.

She is Chief Editor of the International Journal on Advances in Life Sciences and belongs to the editorial board of Medical Informatics and Decision making. She participates in the scientific board of eTelemed conferences and the association for health informatics (NIHI) Canada.  She organized the first international conference on eHealth in the Netherlands, annual conferences in “Supporting Health by Technology”, and has contributed as keynote to several international eHealth conferences and received an award for outstanding research (IARIA, 2011). 

She has been invited in several expert committees to discuss the eHealth research agenda (e.g., NWO-Dutch/China Joint Scientific Thematic Research Programme, ZonMw research agenda, VWS Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport), and reviewed several ZonMw and NWO-grants (e.g. Top research programs) as a main applicant.

Olga Kulyk:
Dr. Kulyk is an assistant professor at the Persuasive Health Technology Lab, Center for eHealth, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands. She is currently involved in research and teaching in user-centred persuasive design, visualization of self-monitoring data and coaching for personalized healthcare technologies, as well as in supervision of PhD, master and bachelor students. Olga’s primary research topic is on visualization of health monitoring data and awareness applications, with main goal to design affective feedback applications for health through persuasive design and personalized visualizations. Her current projects are on:

• visualization of monitoring data in a smart home (elderly care);
• design and evaluation of new digital health services for healthy lifestyle of high-risk adolescents and chronic patients through virtual coaching, mHealth and serious gaming applications (in cooperation with National Government Health Organizations and Public Health Services);
• evaluation methods for situational awareness, group dynamics and persuasiveness (in collaboration with Finland, Harri Oinas-Kukkonen).

She has over nine years of international academic and industrial experience in coordinating and conducting multidisciplinary projects in the fields of public and personal health, human-computer interaction, group decision-making, software engineering and life sciences. In January 2010 she defended her PhD thesis on Situational Awareness and Group Decision Making Support for Co-located Teams in Multidisplay Environments, Human Media Interaction Group, University of Twente. During her PhD, Olga spent three months as a visiting intern at Microsoft Research Redmond, US. Olga’s internship project was on collocated team awareness support via large display visualization. Before the PhD, Olga studied User System Interaction Design during the international 2-year Post-Master program at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e). Her background (master and bachelor) is in computer science.

Dr. Kulyk is currently involved in writing new project proposals to acquire funding (National and EU: NWO, INTERREG, Horizon 2020, ITEA). She recently worked on multidisciplinary international project proposal on smart emotion sensing, persuasive feedback and coaching for crisis management teams through eLearing and serious gaming (ITEA EU funding). In September 2014, her first own small research proposal (1,5 years) ‘Enhancing self-management of high-risk adolescents through persuasive mHealth’ was approved by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), in collaboration between the University of Twente and Municipal Health Services.