Designing a digital dietician

Medical doctor and epidemiologist, Professor Dr Regine Steegers-Theunissen, of Erasmus Medical Centre, has been actively promoting healthy food patterns and lifestyles for parents-to-be. Healthy diets and lifestyles and successful pregnancies are not related like cause and effect, but the associations are strong. In 2007, Steegers-Theunissen started a preconception clinic, called ‘Achieving a healthy pregnancy’, to help make couples aware of their diet and lifestyle as preparation for their future pregnancies. But she wished to further support and guide couples – yes, also the men – about food and drink issues before and during pregnancy.

Kim Thy Nguyen (MSc) took up the gauntlet for her MSc thesis at the faculty of Industrial Design and Engineering. She was to make a website annex app for the target group tailored to nutrition and lifestyle improvement. Nguyen made use of her two years of psychology studies at Erasmus University. She knew that behavioural change is a difficult thing to achieve and that James Prochaska had written a ‘transtheoretical model’ about this in which he argued that behavioural change – like quitting smoking – develops in five or six steps. Only when people have arrived at a certain level, do they become sensitive to health information.

Nguyen developed a website prototype which provides interested couples with information about healthy nutrition. The couples are asked to keep score of the items they eat and drink. The programme then provides feedback on the quantities and items and also issues health tips (´try a less fat cheese instead´). A fellow-student from the Haagse Hogeschool, Joyce Boer, wrote the diet tips and recipes. An overview page shows the participant and his/her doctor what parts of the diet are on target (green check mark) or not quite there yet (red cross).

The prototype on www.slimmerzwanger.nl is Nguyen’s ‘masterpiece’. Programmers will now have to develop it into a web service that interested couples can login to. Nguyen hopes the application will ultimately be developed for smart phones, bringing ‘E-healthcare’ up close and personal.  

Kim Thy Nguyen, ‘Slimmer zwanger’, MSc thesis, 10 June 2011, supervisors Prof. Richard Goossens and Prof. Dr. Regine Steegers-Theunissen

Over the past summer TU Delft bid farewell to its MSc class of 2007-2008. This year – in a break from the past years’ more formal graduation ceremonies, which were replete with mortarboard caps, tassels and gowns – the university hosted a more informal ‘Farewell Celebration 2010’, which strived to both honor the ending of academic programmes as well as celebrate the new beginnings to come for graduates both here and abroad.

The event, held at the TU Delft Library in June, was advertised as ‘The place to be to say goodbye, to network and to stay in touch, to create a memory and to leave your signature on the TU campus!’
TU Delft rector Karel Luyben was on hand to bid adieu to the graduates, and in his opening address he spoke of the importance of international students and their contributions to the university.

This year’s MSc farewell – also billed as ‘Check OUT/IN: farewell to Delft’, taking air travel and journeys as its organizing theme – seemingly aimed to be more practical in nature by giving graduates the opportunity to meet with representatives of TU Delft’s alumni association (which now has an international-alumni network of some 46,500 engineering graduates), Career Centre, and YesDelft, while also offering information about pursuing various PhD opportunities at TU Delft.

All told, approximately 617 internationals students, from more than 50 countries, graduated in the 2009/2010 academic year, with more than 300 of them attending the Farewell event, during which the graduates also received an e-ticket, which they could exchange for a small parting gift. The ticket also served as symbol for both the journey home many would soon be undertaking and also as a symbol of the ‘ticket to success’ that their TU Delft MSc degrees will hopefully be. Finally, in one final break from past year’s graduation events, this year the university did not select an ‘MSc Student of the Year’.

Photos of the farewell event 2010, grouped by faculty.