We are excited to announce that Prof. Dr. Kowatsch has been nominated for the prestigious KITE Award 2022 for his course “Digital Health Project“!

The KITE Award 2022, dedicated to teaching projects and initiatives developed at ETH during its semesters of remote teaching, aims at recognising the exceptional commitment of lecturers during these challenging times and honours outstanding examples.

The course “Digital Health Project” focuses on NCDs (non-communicable diseases), which are the leading cause of death and disability, and digital health interventions (DHIs) for addressing these ailments as traditional personalized human coaching for the prevention or treatment of such NCDs is neither scalable nor financially sustainable.

In this context, students design, implement, and evaluate DHIs for the prevention of NCDs in this interdisciplinary course. Students without coding experience learn how to design, implement, and evaluate smartphone-based and chatbot-delivered health literacy interventions that focus on lifestyle factors such as exercise or sleep. These factors are not only relevant for the prevention of NCDs but also for students suffering from the ongoing pandemic.

Teaching wise, the lecture follows an innovative online flipped classroom concept with both live input sessions and coaching sessions. Additional asynchronous online lessons offer students complimentary learning materials including multiple-choice questions, programming exercises, and video tutorials. The students work in teams to develop the interventions with MobileCoach, an open-source software co-authored by the lecturer Prof. Dr. Kowatsch.

The shortlisted projects for the KITE Award 2022 will present their projects at the Lecturers’ conference in March 2022. The winner will be announced in May 2022.