Internship Assignment Form University Twente
Title: Medisch Spektrum Twente: Health Psychology in the hospital
Type of assignment: MA internship (combination with thesis is possible)
Internal or external: external: MST
Maximum number of students: 2
Individual collecting of data? Yes
Type of research: qualitative & quantitative (depends on Dutch language proficiency
Description of the assignment:
For your internship and thesis you can participate in two of the collaboration projects between MST and the department of Psychology, Health & Technology. It depends on your interests, learning targets and your Dutch language proficiency how your internship/thesis will concretely be formulated.
In these two projects we are happy to welcome students of Health Psychology & Technology:
1. Virtual Reality to improve pain in patients with rheumatic disease
In this project we investigate how patients with rheumatic disease perceive and react to a pain reduction program that is executed via immersive virtual reality. We explore usability, tolerability and possible side effects in this group of patients. Furthermore we aim for understanding the assumed working mechanism of the program and compare this with the perceived working mechanisms and effects reported by patients themselves after using the application. These aspects are only open for students with Dutch language proficiency. A third aspect of this project is a systematic review to summarize effects of VR in pain management of people with rheumatic diseases. This aspect is open to English speaking students.
2. Real time understanding of post-covid symptoms and juist-in-time interventions
To gain insight into the long term impact of COVID-19, a prospective longitudinal COVID-19 study following discharged patients for 12 months to obtain insight into general health status, clinical and psychosomatic symptoms is started in 2020 and broadened by collaboration with the ZGT hospital. In the meanwhile we have data of 750 patients. Data collection is ongoing. In addition to this general longitudinal information, we aim for in-depth understanding of post-COVID symptoms by analysing the patient perspective (through in-depths interviews) and combining these results with real-time data on the presence, severity and especially the variability of symptoms over 14 consecutive days (through experience sampling method). The combination of mixed method data will allow us to identify possible windows for timely interventions to improve post-COVID symptoms and we will explore possible interventions for home use in a small pilot study. Dependent on language proficiency, the candidate can mainly concentrate on the analysis of the available prospective longitudinal survey and ESM data or work more on the intervention part.
What are we offering? Working with an interdisciplinary supervision team and together with students from other disciplines (currently medicine, creative technology & health science)
More information: Dr. Christina Bode (c.bode@utwente.nl) , Dr. Harald Vonkeman (h.vonkeman@mst.nl), Gerko Schaap (g.schaap@utwente.nl)
Supervisor: Dr. Christina Bode or Gerko Schaap (UT) , Dr. Harald Vonkeman (MST)