BackgroundThe Eindhoven MedTech Innovation Center (e/MTIC) is a public-private partnership that aims to create a fast track to high-tech-health innovations in the cardiovascular, perinatal and sleep fields. It combines an academic partner (TU Eindhoven) with 3 semi-academic hospitals (Catharina Hospital, Maxima Medical Center, Kempenhaeghe) and an industrial partner (Philips).
For improvement of patient relevant outcomes in cardiac disease, personalized decision-making and rehabilitation strategies, based on clinical data as well as on psychosocial factors and lifestyle behavior are key. This project combines unobtrusive wearable technologies (incl. wristbands) and smart home technologies with user-friendly patient experience capturing solutions (incl. patient diaries) that have been developed within e/MTIC in recent years. It aims to a) validate and refine these technologies for new forms of self-monitoring of lifestyle and psychosocial wellbeing outside the hospital, and b) integrate them into a reliable, patient-friendly solution for continuous lifestyle monitoring by combining objective and subjective self-monitoring information with information acquired in the clinical setting. It is key to design sustainable solutions that encourage long-term use and continuous engagement, and that also focus on the patient as a central stakeholder.
Industrial Design PhD positionIn this design research trajectory, the PhD student will explore how to design for patient engagement in everyday life to improve the outcomes of the patient's care path, covering home & community, primary, secondary, and tertiary care. The design research questions revolve around the design of an ecosystem of different users, products, and services. The high-level hypothesis is that integrated care combining clinical information and information on lifestyle behavior and psychosocial wellbeing will enable more personalized decision-making and rehabilitation with respect to complex cardiac interventions, leading to better health outcome. Prominent users in this system are the patient, his or her family, close friends, and the care team of healthcare professionals. We are interested in understanding how to gain continuous actionable insights around the patient's engagement and deliver real time design interventions to facilitate a personalized Everyday care path. Important questions are how to design for motivating and engaging interactions with the patient and his or her family in their personal spaces? How to embed (remote) patient engagement into the workflow and staff experience? How to measure the impact of designing for patient engagement on the health outcome? The PhD student will explore one or more of these questions by applying the research through design method with hands-on making and prototyping.
Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e, www.tue.nl) is one of Europe's leading research universities. The Eindhoven area, in the southern part of the Netherlands, is one of Europe's top 'innovation ecosystems', with many high-tech companies and institutes. TU/e is intertwined with many of these companies and institutes, and research at TU/e is characterized by a combination of academic excellence, industrial relevance and societal interweaving. The
Department of Industrial Design (ID) of the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), founded in 2001, is a maturing department with over 650 students, both Bachelor and Master, and around 40 research staff members and about 10 lecturers. The mission of the department of Industrial Design at TU/e is Research on and Education in
the Design of Systems with Emerging Technologies in a Societal Context. The PhDs will be under the supervision of dr.H.M.C. Kemps and dr. Yuan Lu from the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology in collaboration with prof W.Kop from the Department of Medical and Clinical Psychology at Tilburg University. At the TU/e, the positions are situated within the research cluster of 'Future Everyday'. The Future Everyday cluster investigates the everyday interactions between individual people and the highly interconnected technology that surrounds them. Researchers measure, model and design for the user experience when individuals interact with social-technological networks in their homes, at work, in transit, while doing sports or going out.
Prospective starting date: February / March 2020.