Current Projects

I greatly value both cross-disciplinary and cross-sector partnerships for tackling social challenges. My current collaborative projects include investigating digital mental health apps for youth and family wellbeing, frugal innovation in telemedicine, large language models for lifestyle behaviour change, data-driven nutrition systems, and inequities in digital health. In this work I collaborate with adolescents, community social workers, clinicians, engineers, computer scientists, economists, ethicists, industry stakeholders, among others.

In addition to team science, my work is guided by the principles of community-based participatory research, implementation science, precision medicine, public health, and developmental neuroscience.

Below is an overview of a few of my ongoing projects.

Participatory Design of a Health Chatbot with Underrepresented Adolescents

Artifical intelligence such as Large Language Models provide novel opportunities for tailoring health behaviour support to different populations. Adolescence is a critical period for prevention of disease and promotion of well-being across the lifespan through health behaviour intervention. Adolescents are also avid technology adopters. This project specifically focusses on directly involving adolescents traditionally underrepresented in digital health research (e.g., of low socio-economic and migratory backgrounds) in co-designing a chatbot for personalized health behaviour support. Adolescents and community health organizations are key research partners in this project, alongside academic collaborators at Erasmus University Rotterdam, Erasmus Medical Center, and Technical University Delft.

More about this research project can be found in our pre-registration.

Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions for Adolescent and Young Adult Health and Well-being: A Systematic Review

I am currently leading a systematic review of just-in-time adaptive interventions (JITAIs) for health behaviour change in adolescents. JITAIs are digital health interventions using mobile sensing technology to deliver tailored health recommendations precisely when it's needed, personalizing the user's experience based on real-time data. Given that over 70% of deaths globally are due to complex chronic illnesses affecting multiple parts of the body, and key risk factors for these illnesses can be traced to lifestyle behaviours from a young age, JITAIs targeting diverse adolescent health and well-being behaviours are needed. This review seeks to address the existing gaps in our understanding of JITAIs for adolescents, from their design mechanisms to their ethical considerations. Addressing these gaps can importantly contribute to prevention of chronic illness across the lifespan.

See our review protocol published by BMJ Open here.

4TU High Tech for a Sustainable Future

My PhD is part of the 4TU Redesign consortium with 4TU Federation’s High Tech for a Sustainable Future programme. Together with colleagues across the four technical universities in the Netherlands (Delft, Eindhoven, Twente, and Wageningen), we collaborate on research related to data-driven high-tech food systems. My research specifically focusses on the role of public health and equitable health design in such systems, such as its accessibility and inclusion of adolescent digital health needs.

“Imagine a future, where local demand is fulfilled daily by a supply of locally grown, sustainable and nutritious fruits and vegetables. A personal need, for instance triggered by health issues, is automatically translated into the autonomous growing environment, tailoring the growing conditions to the crop, the season and the resources…”

To learn more about this project, visit the website.