Research & Projects

Software engineering, semantics and immersive technology — applied across many domains

Research themes

My research combines software engineering, semantics and immersive technology, applied across domains such as education, sustainability, consumer research, legal technology and health.

Software engineering & reusable design

Architectures robust, reusable and maintainable software.

Context-aware personalization

Systems that adapt services and recommendations to a person's context, preferences and needs

Semantics, ontologies & reasoning

Capturing the domain knowledge of experts and translating it to create context-aware services.

Serious games & gamification

Reusable, modular game elements and design with applications in education and sustainability competencies as well as health and wellbeing.

Virtual & augmented reality

Immersive experiences spanning adaptive video streaming and quality of experience, experimental auctions, rehabilitation and exposure therapy.

Educational innovation

Challenge-based and project-based learning, design thinking and serious games for higher education

Funded projects

As (co-)promotor or principal supervisor.

2026–2027 · FWO – Kom op tegen Kanker

SPARKCS — Supporting Physical Activity via Recommendations from Knowledge-systems for Cancer Survivors

Partners: Faculty of Psychology & Educational Sciences (UGent), Faculty of Rehabilitation Sciences (UAntwerpen)

A personalized digital health intervention helping cancer survivors increase physical activity through a dual-layer recommendation system that combines ontology-based filtering with machine-learning ranking, evaluated in real-world settings.

2025–2027 · ENLIGHT Thematic Network / Erasmus+

TOGETHER — Towards Open Game Environments for Teams in Higher Education and Research

Partners: University of Groningen, University of Bern, Uppsala University, Georgia State University, Ghent University

A hybrid serious game empowering students to become agents of sustainable change, building sustainability competencies (GreenComp) through discipline-specific and cross-disciplinary, international collaboration.

2025–2028 · FWO — Junior Postdoctoral mandate (promotor)

PULSE — A novel co-creation method for designing personalised, modular serious games for health

A co-creation methodology that reduces design complexity and improves reusability and evaluation of personalization strategies, applied to a serious game supporting emotion regulation in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

2024–2026 · IOF (Industrieel Onderzoeksfonds, UGent)

DANS2 — Early screening for autism with an instrumented sock

Partners: RIDDL (Psychology & Educational Sciences), IDLab & CMST (Engineering & Architecture), HOGent

Validating a smart sock that detects movement patterns related to autism in young children, enabling earlier screening and faster referral towards appropriate care.

2024–2028 · FWO Senior Research Project

VRInsect — Consumer preferences for insect-based foods and the impact of VR technology in experimental auctions

Partners: Department of Information Technology & Department of Agricultural Economics (UGent)

Using a marketing-mix lens and VR technology in experimental auctions to better understand consumer preferences and willingness-to-pay for sustainable, insect-based foods. Two PhD students supervised.

2024–2027 · FWO — Senior Postdoctoral mandate (co-promotor)

Point-of-choice prompts to reduce prolonged sedentary behaviour

Determining when, how and to whom prompts to stand or move should be delivered, bringing largely automatic sedentary behaviour into conscious awareness to promote healthy aging.

2022–2026 · FWO-TBM (Applied Biomedical Research)

PECAN — eHealth self-management for persistent pain after breast cancer treatment

Partners: University of Antwerp, Ghent University, UZ Antwerp, KU Leuven & UZ Leuven

An eHealth program combining pain-science education with promotion of an active lifestyle, delivered via a chatbot and wearables, personalized through decision-tree algorithms to reduce pain-related disability in breast cancer survivors.

2021–2025 · Kom op tegen Kanker

Moving to an active lifestyle in cancer survivors — a context-aware personalized eHealth approach

Partners: Department of Health Psychology & Department of Information Technology (UGent)

A context-aware, personalized eHealth intervention that takes into account preferences and barriers to improve the quality of life of cancer survivors.

2020–2024 · BOF-IOP (UGent Interdisciplinary)

CAPS — Context Aware Personalization System for promoting physical activity in adults

Partners: Department of Health Psychology & Department of Information Technology (UGent)

A context-aware, personalized system for promoting an active lifestyle, built on an instance model and validated with single-case experiments. Two PhD students supervised.

2017–2019 · imec.ICON

PATRONUS — Personalized Anxiety Therapy through Longitudinal & User-aware Services

Partners: PreviewLabs, Bazookas, The Human Link, Van Roey, imec, IDLab, mict (UGent)

A personalized, emotion-aware blended-care solution for anxiety disorders, combining wearable physiological monitoring, adaptive VR exposure therapy and a motivational mobile coaching app.

Consortia & research communities

GRAY (IDC)

Interdisciplinary Consortium with Societal Impact (BOF). Boosting healthy aging through translational research, societal outreach and valorization, bridging science and society.

DELTA (IDC)

Interdisciplinary Consortium with Societal Impact (BOF). Bringing researchers together with policy makers, entrepreneurs and civil society to steer digital innovation towards desirable outcomes.

eBehaviorChange (SVO)

Interdisciplinary research on health behaviour change using innovative technologies, spanning movement sciences, psychology, public health and computer science.

iBME (SVO)

A scientific research community grouping expertise in the field of biomedical engineering.