Personalised Monitoring & Coaching | Master Health Sciences

Contribute to the improvement of health, well-being and healthcare through the use of personalised eHealth technologies.

How can smart devices like smartwatches or fitness trackers help people to improve their health and well-being? Could Virtual Reality help to reduce stress, or to control aggression among people with anger issues? And how could an app help patients with chronic illnesses (like Diabetes or heart disease) to manage their chronic health conditions or lifestyle changes in their own daily environment? If you are eager to discover the role eHealth technologies could play in the future of our healthcare system, and if you want to contribute to the successful development, implementation and evaluation of such interventions, then the specialisation in Personalised Monitoring & Coaching is the right choice for you. With the knowledge and expertise you gain in this specialisation, you will be the linking pin between IT developers and healthcare organisations.

what is personalised monitoring & coaching?

While many sectors and industries are making rapid progress in digitalisation, the healthcare sector is lagging behind. All the while, eHealth offers great opportunities for patient-centric and data-driven healthcare. So what is needed for the successful development, implementation and evaluation of eHealth interventions? That’s the focus of this specialisation. More specifically, you will focus on interventions aimed at behavioural or attitude change for promoting well-being and improved health. What are examples of kinds of technologies that are available, and what do they do? What persuasive features can you integrate into an eHealth technology (e.g. an app, VR training, social robot, etc) to ensure that users will adopt a certain desired behaviour? How can you use and track health-related data, and how can these insights help individuals to monitor their own health? And how do you translate these insights into an effective, personalised coaching strategy? These are just some of the questions you will deal with in this specialisation.

Examples of courses you will follow during this specialisation:

The course eHealth Development: a holistic approach will provide you with a broad framework for – and an ability to critically reflect on – eHealth development, implementation and evaluation, covering topics such as requirement specification, persuasive design methods, prototyping, usability testing, user engagement and evaluation methods.
In the course eHealth Technology, you will learn to design and develop an end-to-end telemedicine system for long-term care and healthy lifestyle for patients with a chronic condition.
How can a technology be designed in such a way that it can influence the attitudes and behaviours of people? And how can data be translated into meaningful information, which can be used to coach people? That’s the focus of the course Monitoring and Persuasive Coaching.

With your knowledge as a health scientist, you will not merely focus on the deployment of an eHealth intervention as a goal on its own, you will know how to ensure that the technology fits within the context that it will be used for. You will develop an interdisciplinary approach, in which you learn to include not only the perspective of a user or patient, for instance, but also that of a healthcare provider, or other stakeholders. Suppose you want to implement an eHealth solution for care coordination in homecare: how do you make sure that both the staff and patients are equipped to work with the technology? Does it match the work processes? And are IT systems compatible? Your contextual knowledge and in-depth insights into the healthcare sector along with your focus on human-centred design and behavioural change will make you the perfect link between technology designers and healthcare providers.

what will you learn?

As a graduate of this Master's and this specialisation, you have acquired specific, scientific knowledge, skills and values, which you can put to good use in your future job.

Knowledge
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- have insight into if, how and when innovative monitoring and coaching technologies such as mobile apps, wearables, VR and personal health records can be used to improve health, well-being and healthcare;
- are familiar with an interdisciplinary approach towards the development, implementation and evaluation of eHealth, via frameworks and theories from different disciplines, such as human-centred design, psychology, implementation sciences and engineering;
- understand the importance of a holistic perspective on eHealth to account for the content and design of a technology, the needs and characteristics of stakeholders such as patients, healthcare providers and managers, and the integration of technology within the intended contexts.
Skills
After successfully finishing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- have skills related to the interdisciplinary development of technology for behaviour change, in which you know how to speak the language of technology designers (e.g. requirements), acquire basic prototyping skills, and gain insight into how to integrate behaviour change theories in eHealth technologies;
- are able to implement technology in practice, amongst other things by analysing uptake via log data analysis, planning adoption using implementation frameworks, and identifying and involving stakeholders from practice using a multi-method approach;
- can select and execute fitting strategies to evaluate technology, enabling you to collect and analyse different types of qualitative and quantitative data for multiple purposes, such as the analysis of an existing problem, research on the effectiveness of an eHealth technology, and investigation of the working mechanisms of technology.
Values
After completing this Master’s specialisation, you:
- understand the importance of – and acquire the skills to – work as an interdisciplinary professional in a broad range of healthcare contexts, in which you will be able to communicate and connect with a broad range of professionals;
- can come up with creative, innovative approaches to increase the impact of technology on individuals’ well-being and our healthcare system;
- are able to critically reflect on the added value – or lack thereof – of technologies in practice.

other master's and specialisations

Is this specialisation not exactly what you’re looking for? Maybe one of the other specialisations suits you better. Or find out more about related Master’s:

Master’s in Psychology (specialisations in Health Psychology & Technology and Human Factors & Engineering)
Biomedical Engineering

Curriculum