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Digital Health & Learning

Focus areas:

  • Tablet and mobile health applications for older adults and people with dementia
  • XR and AI in therapy and diagnostics, e.g. exposure therapy, cognitive support
  • Multimodal Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs)
  • Healthcare workflows and clinical UX design
  • Evaluation of technology adoption in care settings

Our work in digital health centers on the development and evaluation of user-centered technologies to support diagnostics, therapy, and self-management—particularly for older adults, people with dementia, and those with mental health conditions. We design tablet- and XR-based systems that facilitate patient-reported outcomes, guided interventions, and interactive health education. A special focus lies on the integration of intelligent virtual agents and adaptive interfaces to increase motivation, empathy, and usability in clinical and everyday settings. Our projects are embedded in interdisciplinary networks, combining expertise from medicine, psychology, computer science, and public health to improve healthcare delivery and promote digital inclusion.

Related projects:

Therapy and care

Immersive systems reach clinical settings through the people who work in them. We study avatar-based cognitive therapy and what a change in dysfunctional beliefs and self-esteem looks like over the course of it, which type of virtual character a therapist can work with effectively, how embodied and non-embodied agents differ in rehabilitation, and what augmented reality contributes to the treatment of stress and anxiety disorders. Each of these is run with clinical partners, because a laboratory result about care that nobody in care can use is not a result.

Assistive technology and neurodevelopmental disorders

A long strand of this line works with and for people with neurodevelopmental disorders: training attention skills in virtual reality, tangible augmented reality, collaborative games in wearable virtual reality, and controlled comparisons of shared-boundary interfaces against touch. The recurring question is whether one interface can fit everyone — it cannot — and what follows from that for the design of systems meant to support communication and participation.

Training where mistakes are expensive

Where a mistake in the real setting costs a life, a rotor or a runway, simulation is not a convenience. We evaluate extended-reality training in challenging environments, from wind turbines to emergency response, and study how training adapts when physiological measurement shows the trainee is at the edge of their capacity. The measure that matters is transfer: what the person can do afterwards, in the real place.

Learning, in school and after illness

The same methods carry into education and recovery: what it takes to integrate virtual and augmented reality into public education rather than into a pilot project, and what an app-based intervention achieves for naming in people with post-stroke aphasia. Both are places where the technology is judged by whether it still works when the novelty is gone.

Selected work