eHealth

Empowering people to manage health & well-being is our passion. A Human Touch in a High Tech environment inspires to use innovative research methods to develop and evaluate personalized interventions and technologies. Rooted in psychology, we adopt interdisciplinary and participatory approach to develop meaningful and sustainable health promoting solutions.

The centre creates synergy in health & wellbeing research through the combination of 4 research labs: Positive Psychology and Technology, Story Lab, Persuasive Health Technology, Self-Management and Health Assessment Lab. These labs capture the available scientific expertise within the department Psychology, Health and Technology to meet interdisciplinary challenges in research and education. When we speak of labs we do not refer to well-controlled experiments but to research in the context of daily life and practice. This is where new technologies have to prove themselves.

Health issues in modern society are rapidly changing. On one hand it is clear that the prevalence of both physical and mental diseases is increasing, becoming more or less chronic for many people. An important aim for health care is to support people in coping with vulnerabilities and to live pleasant, engaged and meaningful lives, also in the presence of physical and mental challenges. On the other hand there is the high potential of technology to support and innovate healthcare. What is unimaginable now, will be possible in ten or twenty years of time. The great challenge for health care of the 21st century is to support health and wellbeing with technology in a meaningful, effective and human way. The Centre for eHealth & Wellbeing Research is in a unique position to meet this challenge by performing psychological research within a high tech environment of the University of Twente.

We express The Human Touch in high Tech context.

Human Touch in Technology. Technology should focus on human needs in the context of daily life and practice.

This implies that technologies have to be meaningful, persuasive, adaptive and easy accessible: they must make sense for people of all ages, cultures and educational levels. New technologies need to be motivating, attractive and easy to use.

Personalizing health & wellbeing interventions implies both collecting data from real time use of technologies (log data, big data) for monitoring health and wellbeing as collecting large numbers of data with single persons in their daily lives.

Personalized health care builds on precise and flexible measurement of individual health needs and characteristics. Personalized technologies have to be interactive and to provide intelligent individually adapted, persuasive feedback.

It is important to understand how technologies impact peoples’ lives. We apply both quantitative and qualitative research methods. Find out more about our methods by visiting our research lab pages.