Testing the feasibility of the stand-alone setup with Virtual Reality application for stress induction
Internship assignment description:
Stress in daily life matters for health psychology: chronic stress contributes to both physical and mental ill-health, and wearables and other eHealth technologies increasingly promise to track stress, cue people in the moment and support stress management. Before such technology can be built into health-promoting interventions, it needs to show that it captures stress responses accurately. In this internship you will work with researchers from the Stress in Action consortium (stress-in-action.nl) and user-test a stand-alone setup containing a SiA Virtual Reality application for stress induction. We are looking for an HPT student interested in stress and in making technology work for the people who use it – not a computer technician or a highly tech-savvy person, since we want this setup to be usable by psychologists without technical support. You will first familiarize yourself with the setup, help us test whether it is usable outside the confines of our laboratory, and identify what is essential for its successful installation and use. You will then systematically document this testing and, in a user-centred, iterative way, fine-tune the existing user manual that accompanies the application. You may also assist in ongoing work with other VR stress-induction protocols and wearable devices. The output of your internship is a report outlining your testing methods, your findings and the improved manual.
Supervisor: Magdalena Sikora, in collaboration with BMS Lab and Jordi Weldink