I am a researcher at the Human Media Interaction (HMI) group of the University of Twente. I received an MSc degree in Human Media Interaction and an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering (Emerging Technology Design track), and a PhD on my work on "(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior". I focus my research on interactive whole body interaction and persuasion during play, where we look at various contexts from stimulating movement to transforming social interactions, and from doing this for children to elderly.
I am a assistant professor at the Human Media Interaction (HMI) group of the University of Twente. I received an MSc degree in Human Media Interaction and an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering (Emerging Technology Design track), and a PhD on my work on "(Steering) Interactive Play Behavior".
My educational activities mainly involve Bachelor's students from Creative Technology and Master's students from the Interaction Technology (former HMI) programme at the University of Twente. I teach Game Design and am part of New Media module, am involved in the course Design of Persuasive Health Technologies, Designing Interactive Experiences, and the module Intelligent Interaction Design. This latter module is related to UX and focuses on grounded design decisions and evaluations of interactive systems. In this course Bachelor's students from Business \& IT and Technical Computer Science programmes also participate. Furthermore, I set up and teach in the course on Games, Media and UX together with teachers from Utrecht University, a course for highschool computer science teachers.
Often together with Dennis Reidsma and Randy Klaassen I (co-)supervise a number of BSc and MSc students on topics related to interactive play and gaming. In total I have currently tutored numerous (>20) student projects, including Bachelor's theses (majority Creative Technology and an occasional Computer Science student), and Master's thesis, from which three projects have led to peer-reviewed full papers. Occasionally I also gives guest lectures on other topics, such as designing for people with special needs, or the use of pervasive persuasive technology.
I was (co-)initiator and (co-)author of three accepted grant proposals (1.75 fte years), and gave valuable input on a bigger one (approx 6fte years). The last porject is about persuasive technology in the form of a game to get people motivated to move more earlier and more during a hospital stay. My first project built upon student projects that I initiated by contacting and starting cooperation with LEDGo, which in turn led to cooperation with Rehabilitation Centre De Hoogstraat. This project (GREAT) focused on motivating adaptive interactive gait rehabilitation with games on an interactive LED floor, which had a clear link with my work on interactive playgrounds, and which was included as Part III of this thesis.The larger accepted project is also related to this but on from a sports and data domain perspective.
At the end of 2014 I also initiated the *Bot project. `StarBot' was a project investigating the impact of telepresence robots in everyday life, done part-time with Merijn Bruijnes over a period of over a year. The project focused on investigating the opportunities and the social, ethical, and technical issues that come forward when we start using these `Skype on wheels'-robots in our every-day lives.
Overall my research focuses on combining the benefits of play, with the engagement of gaming, and the possibilities of exergaming technology. In which I address relevant, attainable, and measurable outcomes. During the design I am always looking at what is technically feasible, what has been done in related literature, and looking at what stakeholders (currently) do and want. For this latter aspect both discussions and observations are applied. During the evaluation I prefer to combine the use of automatic measurements, (direct) observations, discussions, and questionnaires. Preferably, by means of comparative studies (of interventions) where such combined results can convincingly show effects of certain (game) design elements. Although at the same time I also keep in mind a more holistic view.
I am currently employed as a assistant professor at HMI & CreaTe. The educational activities mainly involve Bachelor's students from Creative Technology and Master's students from the Human Media Interaction programme at the University of Twente. In have taught the course Game Design and am part of Interactive Media module and the module Intelligent Interaction Design. This latter module is related to UX and focuses on grounded design decisions and evaluations of interactive systems. I am also one of the main teachers in the master course Experience Design for Interaction.
I (co-)supervise a number of BSc and MSc students on topics related to interactive play and gaming. In total I have currently tutored numerous (>60) student projects, 10 Bachelor's theses (Creative Technology, Technical Computer Science , Atlas, and Biomedical Technology), and Master's thesis projects (Interaction Technology, Computer Science /data science, Educational Science, and some from Technical Medicine), from which several have led to peer-reviewed (full) papers. Occasionally I also give guest lectures on other topics, such as designing for people with special needs, using embodied interaction for teaching, or the use of pervasive technology.
Specific contexts I currently work on include inclusive cultural heritage experiences, sports HCI, and sportification and steering whole-body interactions for healthy living.
Courses in the current academic year are added at the moment they are finalised in the Osiris system. Therefore it is possible that the list is not yet complete for the whole academic year.
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