Merlijn Smits

Healthcare technologies greatly affect experiences, values, and thereby wellbeing of patients. These mediating ‘soft’ effects of technologies often remain underexposed in the design process. With her background in industrial design engineering and philosophy of technology at the University of Twente, Enschede, Merlijn Smits is fascinated by the mediating effects that technologies have and aims to guide designers into technology assessment and responsible design. In her PhD research at the Radboud university medical center Merlijn leads multiple studies on the mediating effects of state of the art technologies on patient wellbeing, including continuous monitoring with wearable devices, Virtual Reality treatments for chronic pain and an integrated personalised healing system for hospital patient rooms.