A great experience!

As a researcher, there is nothing more fun than telling others about all the things you have and have not researched. This could be on a train where you suddenly find yourself talking to a fellow passenger after a conference visit, or at the coffee machine with colleagues. But the most fun is telling about your own research work at a conference. Often the conferences I attend are small-scale and the listeners to my story can be counted on a few hands, but last Thursday was different. Last Thursday (November 9, 2023), I had the opportunity to tell a full room at the DCRM (Dutch Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine) about the use of personalised health technology in specialised medical rehabilitation care. A room full of rehabilitation physicians, researchers and a single patient.

It was my colleague Corien Nikamp who came into my office in the spring and asked if I wanted to give a keynote at the DCRM. Actually, I never think long about these kind of questions, so I immediately said to her that I would like to. Nice, I thought! All summer, I had planned to get busy preparing the presentation. Of course, there were plenty of other things to do, so preparing the presentation was put on hold. Fortunately, at times I did manage to scribble something on a piece of paper and that's how the story emerged. First in my head and then on paper, schematically and especially focusing on the message and the transitions I wanted to make. But luckily the weekend before the conference, the time had come and I had managed to make my story visible in a PowerPoint presentation of 36 slides. After practising the presentation in my head several times during my daily bike ride to and/or from work, I was confident. To make it even more exciting, the evening before the conference I had given myself the assignment to include a code word in my presentation. And that too has succeeded!