dr. M.L. Noordzij (Matthijs)

Designing compassionate technology with high societal readiness levels for mental healthcare

I'm project leader of this NWO funded project. It is a collaboration between 4 research groups at the University of Twente (Psychology, Health and Technology; Interaction Design; Philosophy and Human Media Interaction), Dimence and Minddistrict. n this project we will find new ways to design and develop with a value that is central to mental healthcare: Compassion. Instead of pushing new technology into healthcare, can we design technology starting from human values? Such compassionate technology should be able to deliver on the promise that technology can improve quality and access to mental healthcare.

Stress in Action

Advancing the Science of Stress by Moving the Lab to Daily Life

Stress-in-Action capitalizes on the fast advances in technology and big data analytics to move stress research from the lab to daily life. The Consortium enables synergistic collaborations to discover 1) how responses to daily-life stress arise from the temporal, dynamic interplay between context and person-specific factors, 2) how daily-life stress can be reliably measured in a specific individual in real-time, and 3) how and when potential beneficial stress-response mechanisms turn into detrimental effects on mental and cardiometabolic health. This enables the development of novel monitoring and intervention strategies to track and reduce daily-life stress and its health impact.

VRelax - Self-management of stress and sleep disturbances with virtual reality relaxation for people with mood, anxiety or psychotic disorders.

Does adding a virtual reality self-management stress-reduction tool (VRelax) to treatment as usual (TAU) reduce psychiatric symptoms, medication use, improve psychosocial functioning and reduce costs in patients with anxiety, depressive, bipolar or psychotic disorder when compared to TAU only, and what are the barriers and facilitators for implementation of VRelax in healthcare?

If we know better, do we do better: self efficacy through wearable technologies

I'm a copromotor for this project; Cooperation with Prof. Vollenbroek-Hutten (University of Twente), Dr. Tibert Verhagen (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences) and CBRE.Elizabeth Nelson studies how information from wearable technology empowers people in maintaining healthy behavior. In addition, the effects of healthy office interventions is studied longitudinally in her doctoral research. Finally, a new embodiment scale will be developed for wearable technologies.