DIGHEL4370: Welcome to the course

Dear all

The course DIGHEL4370 will start in roughly one month from now. During the coming weeks, the course page will be populated with information, including the topic and readings for each session. Until then, here is a bit of practical information to help you prepare for the course.

Purpose and format

In this course you will be introduced to the Biodesign framework for digital health innovation and provide you with some practical experience in completing a small-scale project following this approach.

The lectures and seminars will be structured as joint teaching sessions, meaning that we will meet in one 4-hour session per week. These will be organized as ‘studio-based’ learning sessions, and hereby combine presentations, exercises, and not least practical group work on the project.

During the course, you will collaborate in interdisciplinary groups. These groups will be formed on the first day and will bring together students with backgrounds in informatics and healthcare, and hereby provide you with the opportunity to learn from the experiences of other students with a different background than your own.

Course literature

The core of the course literature will be the following book which you are asked to acquire before the course begins (for instance here):

• Yock, Zenios, Makower, Brinton, Kumar, Watkins, & Denend (2015): BioDesign: The process of innovating medical technologies. Cambridge University Press, 2nd edition.

This book provides a very comprehensive set of methods and techniques for use in digital health innovation. We will read selected chapters from this book mainly focusing on methods for researching user needs and the user domain, and for designing and experimenting with solutions. While some topics and chapters will remain untouched, some will be covered later in the program on the course IN4380 Digital Transformation, not least regarding the societal, financial, and regulatory context of digital health innovation.

In addition to this, the course syllabus will include selected research papers and the online ressource ‘An Online Guide to Biodesign’ (link), which you are encouraged to familiarize yourself with before the course.

First teaching session

The first session in the course takes place on October 15th, 10.15-14.00 in OJD Sem Python. It is very important that you attend this session as we will form groups and launch the projects this day.

Kind regards,

Troels Mønsted