Keynotes

The conference organising committee is proud to announce our three distinguished keynote speakers:


Health psychology in international health partnerships: Reflections, questions and challenges
Prof. Lucie Byrne-Davis

The Covid-19 pandemic caused the world to have a long, hard look at itself. In the world of health psychology, more people started to ask ‘What do we know?’, ‘How confident are we about what we know?’ and ‘How can people use that information to do some good?’ For those of us working on the edge of academia and practice, we need to ask and answer these questions. In this talk, I will describe some of my work in which I have tried to apply theories, methods and evidence from health psychology to support health professional practice change and to generate evidence from those attempts. In particular, I will talk about work in health partnerships between countries that seek to improve health outcomes through improving quality of care. Using this example, I hope to ask some challenging questions about whether we are asking and answering the right questions in health psychology.

Lucie Byrne-Davis is a Professor of Health Psychology at the University of Manchester and an HCPC registered Health Psychologist. She is an expert in translational and collaborative behaviour change research and practice, working at the intersection between evidence use and generation. Her research and practice are about translating health psychology to support behaviour change, with a focus on health worker behaviours. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Fellow of the European Health Psychology Society, where she was Chair of the UN committee from 2017-2022. She is current chair of the British Psychological Society - Division of Health Psychology. She co-founded two volunteering collaboratives for health psychologists to volunteer in global health partnerships (https://thechangeexchange.org) and during Covid (the Health Psychology Exchange)

Updating the Person-Based Approach to intervention development
prof. Lucy Yardley

This talk will consider how co-production can be integrated into the Person-Based Approach (www.personbasedapproach.org) to develop effective and engaging interventions. The Person-Based Approach uniquely combines user-centred design methods with evidence-based behaviour change methods. This ensures that better uptake and engagement with the intervention leads to offline behaviour change and better healthcare outcomes. The approach is based on experiences of successfully developing and evaluating numerous interventions that have been shown to be cost-effective in large-scale national and international clinical trials.

The talk will first explain how the Person Based Approach has been updated consistent with best practice for involving members of the community and other stakeholders in intervention co-production. Application of the updated PBA will then be illustrated by examples of how it has been used to develop interventions for patients and healthcare practitioners, for public health and clinical settings, and for people from diverse cultures and different ages and abilities. These illustrations include the adaptation and national implementation of the ‘Germ Defence’ digital intervention to reduce transmission of Covid-19 in the home, and the development and national rollout of the ‘ARK’ (Antibiotic Review Kit) intervention to reduce antibiotic overuse in hospitals.

Lucy Yardley has a longstanding interest in developing accessible and effective interventions that can support patients and people in the community to manage their health and treatment. Her programme of research focuses on key questions concerning how to maximise engagement with digital interventions and how best to integrate digital support for self-management of health with healthcare services. She addresses these questions through the development and evaluation of numerous web-based healthcare interventions, such as interventions to support weight management, physical activity, reduction of infection transmission and antibiotic over-use, and self-management of long-term health conditions (including cancer, hypertension, diabetes, back pain, asthma, cognitive decline and many other health problems). Through this work she has pioneered the widely used ‘Person-Based Approach’ (see www.personbasedapproach.org) to combining stakeholder co-production with theory-based qualitative and quantitatie methods for intervention development and optimisation.

Wearable Technology and Self-Management: Enhancing Emotion Regulation through Biocueing
Prof. Matthijs Noordzij

The challenges in self- and stress-management associated with behavior change  often stem from difficulties in emotion processing. Biocueing technology can monitor and provide feedback on bodily changes in daily life to help individuals recognize and manage their emotions. A recent systematic review provided preliminary evidence that adding general, non-specific biocueing to interventions for self-management can be effective. Commercial smartwatch technology can provide biocueing by itself, but it can also be further (re)designed specifically for certain patient groups. This presentation explores the opportunities and challenges associated with designing biocueing technology, followed by a discussion of four recent studies on the feasibility and (clinical) potential of biocueing for enhancing emotion regulation and stress management.

Studies 1-3 focused on the use of biocueing technology in forensic psychiatric patients. These studies examined the acceptance and potential clinical added value of biocueing, the development and evaluation of a wearable biocueing app, and the effects of a wearable biocueing app as an addition to aggression regulation therapy. Study 4 investigated the receptivity of employees to just-in-time self-tracking and eCoaching for stress management based on biocueing technology.

These studies demonstrate the potential and challenges of biocueing as an adjunct to stress management and aggression regulation therapy. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the research, development and implementation of biocueing-based interventions in clinical and prevention settings.

Matthijs Noordzij is professor in health psychology and technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands. He studies the scientific basis and design principles for how (sensor) technology (e.g. a smartwatch measuring physiological signals and capable of giving coaching cues) might support and change (mental) healthcare and self-management. His research has involved working out new scientific standards for validating new wearable technologies that are measuring important aspects of human physiology for use in (mental) healthcare and research. He has coordinated several innovative field studies that tracked people (with subjective and objective measures) with severe problems related to stress, aggression or addiction over long periods of time trying to establish possible links between their bodies, thoughts, behaviour and environments. Thirdly, with various stakeholders (patients, caregivers, managers, designers, developers, scientists) he was involved in co-designing ambulatory biofeedback and novel bio cueing systems for self-regulation. For the next years his focus will be on integrating all these themes on the topic of moving the measurement of stress from the lab to daily life in the multidisciplinary Stress-in-Action project (https://stress-in-action.nl/)