On the 14th of October 2024, prof. dr. Matthijs Noordzij and colleagues organised a networking event at GGz Centraal in Amersfoort, on wearables in practice.
The main goal of this meeting was to bring together scientists, professionals working in mental health care facilities and businesses (and their technologies) interested in the implementation of wearables in mental health care.
There were many interesting presentations on implementation of wearables. For example, a dashboard showing the measurements of the wearables (e.g. steps, sleep, heart rate) to indicate the mental state of the patient and the effectivity of their treatments. This could give the patient some insight in the effects of healthy behaviour. This however is not beneficial for all patients: having access to all this data could easily stress you out even more!
One of SiA’s PhD students, Merel van den Berg, is focusing on user-centered design, she explains: “It was especially interesting to see the problems in wearables in user experience: many wearables are too complex to use in some patient groups and even their clinicians experience some difficulty. I was happy to see some designs that really tackled these problems. I learned more about socks measuring indicators of stress and a relaxing VR experience that could easily be controlled with your head.”
More information on Wearables in Practice can be found on the website of De Borg.