Empowerment for Health & Wellbeing

In this Honors track you will conduct a 1-year project where you choose the topic from a list of interesting cases. These cases introduce a brief challenge and often come with a real client. Then, it is up to you to define your vision and ideas on the solution... and make that a reality. Cases can range from a 3D artificial heart, food coach apps, wearable devices, medical robots, or any project you find interesting yourself even. You will be inspired by lectures, workshops, and exciting projects with actual stakeholders.

You will learn to work with companies, users, patients, and healthcare professionals. You will engage in user-driven innovation and co-creation methods such as Data-Enabled Design. You’ll also be able to bring your idea from paper into reality by prototyping hardware and software. Tools such as 3D Printers, Laser cutters, Electronics and Software methods are at your disposal.

Over the last few years, we have done projects in motivating medicine adherence, dealing with secondary prevention systems in cardiac rehabilitation, investigated physical activity in office environments, developed wearable ultrasound imaging tools, a food intake coaching app and more exciting project. Quite a diversity! With a good plan, we also welcome initiatives and your own topics!

This honors track is under supervision of Victor Donker, a part-time lecturer at the department of Industrial Design who also works in industry part of the week. Victor has wide experience as entrepreneur and likes to match students with stakeholder and real life settings. Within Industrial Design there is a strong focus on experiential way of research, often called research-through-design, building proposals and prototypes that facilitate and guide the research towards a possible direction the solution should take. This makes Empowerment for Health & Wellbeing a hands-on honors track, with opportunities to build prototypes, both in software and hardware, and in the context of a real user. It involves not only design of prototypes, but also of the environment people act in, as well as how we investigate patient psychology, deal with physical and mental wellbeing, and construct both hard- and software infrastructures.

Leading an unhealthy lifestyle is currently one of the main problems in western society. As a result, the costs of healthcare and increasing exponentially. This combination currently presents a huge societal but also an economical and organizational challenge. To give focus to the challenge at hand we pose the following question: "How do we design intelligent systems that empower people to take care of their own health and wellbeing?" You will try to tackle this problem by learning how to develop and design systems together with these people, in a real context and with a real client. Through advanced design processes you will learn about working with patients, medical professionals, and businesses to develop physical or digital tools that empower people to take their problems into their own hands.

In year 2 students are encouraged to continue the projects to reach a higher level and to engage with stakeholders even more professionally than before.

Learning goals

Students learn more about business situations and to bring their concepts and prototypes to real life settings, think about potential market approach/strategy. We think about questions like: How feasible is the concept? What are the risks of clinically implementing this solution? Who would be the customers of this solution? What is the right market? How do we need to improve the prototype to scale to a production ready product? Which other stakeholders do we need to include? How should we finance the development?

Year 2 students are expected to guide Year 1 students, to share and show their knowledge.