Dr. Renske van Wijk

In the near future, keeping healthcare available and affordable is set to become increasingly challenging, which calls for a new generation of solutions that can prevent, replace or relocate healthcare. As we learn more about how behaviour, lifestyle and our surroundings affect our health, a greater emphasis is placed on prevention and health promotion.

In this process of improving health and devoting more attention to prevention, citizens need to play an increasingly important role. This is in line with today’s trends of increased self-management and self-reliance in healthcare, with citizens requiring more insight into and autonomy over their health. Therefore, in the TOPFIT Citizenlab, we focus on citizen involvement, participation and even taking the lead in researching, testing, modifying and implementing innovations.

TOPFIT Citizenlab is a regional fieldlab focused on citizen science for health, wellbeing and technology. This fieldlab is funded by the regional and national government and aims to grow into a sustainable collaboration between relevant stakeholders while conducting citizen science projects. Projects are a.o. technology supported life style interventions for diabetes patients, citizen science tools for self measurements in RA patients, technologies for elderly people.

Dr. Renske van Wijk works as valorisation officer at the Technical Medical Centre of the University of Twente. The mission of the TechMed Centre is to impact healthcare by personalized technology.

Mrs van Wijk holds a PhD in Health Sciences and focuses on making societal impact with health technologies. She aims to bring science and society close together by letting them collaborate in science and innovation trajectories: citizen science.