As the summer season comes to an end, we pause to appreciate the progress made by the 4D PICTURE project members and energize ourselves with new insights for the promising journey ahead.
In a public lecture titled “Taking Control When You’re Ill: Promise or Illusion?” Judith Rietjens explored what it truly means for patients to “take control” during illness. Her talk emphasized the importance of shared decision‑making and collaboration among patients, families, clinicians, and communities in building more person‑centered and sustainable healthcare.
The Spanish team presented two papers at the Design Research Society (DRS) 2026 Conference in Edinburgh. Yeray Sañudo introduced research on how participatory and emotional design can enhance oncology patients’ first‑consultation experiences. Meanwhile, Jorge Sierra‑Pérez and Erika Renedo Illarre examined the ethical complexities of shadowing cancer patients throughout their care journeys.
A major milestone was reached with Elfi Verheul’s successful PhD defence, with roughly half of the thesis developed within the 4D PICTURE project. This achievement underscores the project’s growing impact on personalised, evidence‑based, and patient‑centered oncology care.
And finally, at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (SMDM) in Oslo, Anne Stiggelbout presented a poster on how shared decision‑making (SDM) is expressed in oncology consultations across Denmark, Spain, and the Netherlands. The study investigates how coding practices, shaped by language, cultural context, and coders’ experience influence the assessment of SDM quality.
All these research highlight point to one overarching theme that the 4D PICTURE project is steadily strengthening patient-centered cancer care through multidisciplinary, ethically grounded and internationally collaborative research.
Read a description of the lecture in Dutch: https://www.tudelft.nl/evenementen/2026/sg/03-mar/zelf-de-regie-houden-als-je-ziek-bent-belofte-of-illusie
Read study one: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1790
Read study two: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2226
Read more about SMDM: https://smdm.org/
